


soul, I hear you calling

by serenityfails



Series: there's gonna come a day when you feel better [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drinking to Cope, Final Fuck Count: 339, Flashbacks, Found Family, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infidelity, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Past Abuse, Pining, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural Elements, Supernatural Skype Sex, Underage Drinking, Voyeurism, just trying to add some levity to this shit guess I'll go fuck myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-05 20:31:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21214631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/pseuds/serenityfails
Summary: He catches a glimpse of himself, bruise-eyed and unshaven, in the bathroom mirror as he turns to leave, and that's when he sees Eddie Kaspbrak."At least wash your hands, you nasty fuck," Eddie says."Holy fucking shit," Richie screams.Eddie comes back, sort of.





	soul, I hear you calling

**Author's Note:**

> "I'll write a little ghost-Eddie fic," I said. "It'll be short and fun," I said. Yeah, uh, that one backfired on me, and 40k later I'm lying in a ditch crying about grief or something. I put all of my love and anger for a perfectly flawed story into this fic, and I hope it provides some catharsis for you like it ended up doing for me. Very firmly fic for the new movies, but I hope you will notice a touch of my affection for the 1990 miniseries in it as well. Side pairings are Ben/Bev and Mike/Bill, but I will refrain from cluttering up their tags any further than I'm sure they already are.
> 
> Huge thanks to Riss and Marie for helping me fix what needed fixed, and cheering me when I needed cheered. Huge thanks to Whit for terrorizing my DMs. I DID IT FOR YOU.
> 
> [Here's a playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6162td028Q9l1cjQd9InwS?si=Mk8zn202S5-hDvJxApspQQ) I used to inflict pain on myself while I was writing. Title from "A Little Respect" by Erasure.

He hits the rim more than the bowl as he pisses out his dinner. Mold is starting to form a ring around the toilet-- he can't remember the last time he cleaned it, and he doesn't bother wiping up the mess when he flushes, on autopilot. He catches a glimpse of himself, bruise-eyed and unshaven, in the bathroom mirror as he turns to leave, and that's when he sees Eddie Kaspbrak.

"At least wash your hands, you nasty fuck," Eddie says.

"Holy fucking shit," Richie screams.

"Richie," the Eddie in his mirror says. He has that familiar hangdog look on his face, big brown eyes and forlorn, upturned brows. Richie's stomach flips over. He feels like he's going to throw up.

_"I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU, YOU FUCKING CLOWN,_" Richie hollers, and grasps blindly around on the floor until his hand finds a slipper. He hurls it at the mirror. It bounces off, rattling the glass, sending the toiletries on his counter scattering across the room. Eddie just looks offended.

"I'm not the fucking clown, asshole!"

"Go away," Richie says. "You're not real. You're not real, you're not real, you're not _fucking _real."

"Richie, come on, listen to me," Eddie starts, and Richie covers his ears, cowering on the bathroom floor on top of his discarded, dirty clothes.

_"You're a useless piece of shit and you died in a sewer you bitch-ass motherfucking clown!"_

Eddie looks hurt, and that makes Richie feel even more like shit. He scrambles out, half on his hands and knees, and slams the door shut behind him. In the dark hallway, he draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them so tightly it hurts, and he cries.

It's 4 AM. Richie hasn't been outside this apartment in probably going on a week now. There are takeout containers stacked on every flat surface in his living room, and some on the floor. A month ago, he'd come back to LA expecting to cancel the rest of his tour dates and fire his manager, only to find they'd been canceled for him and he'd been fired first. So that was fine. He had a bit of money stashed away from the shitty frat boy comedy he'd gotten second billing in, enough to piss away his life eating delivery burritos and drinking his way through his liquor cabinet for a little while. Sometimes just the latter, if he's honest about it.

Things were better now, right? They'd won. The forgotten shit that had been driving Richie quietly insane for the last twenty-seven years suddenly made sense now, and they'd beaten It, and they were all better off for it. Mike is finally free to leave Derry and live the life he'd been missing out on holding guard for the rest of their sorry asses, Bill's putting a cork in another mid-grade horror flick that would be sure to print money, Bev and Ben are being absurdly attractive together on some yacht in Acapulco or wherever the hell… and Richie's fine. He's alive, so that puts him one up on Stan or Eddie.

Fuck.

He presses the balls of his hands into his eyes until spots bloom behind his eyelids. _When you open them, he'll be gone. It'll just be you, alone. Just like before. It's not real._ He forces his eyes open, adjusting to the dark, blinking away floating lights. Empty. Quiet. Just like before. He breathes out, a laborious, shuddering thing. He's just working off the last of the alcohol, he decides. Intergalactic clownery aside, hallucinations aren't something he's dealt with since the time he did shrooms with Miley Cyrus, but maybe that's just a thing that happens to him all the time now. Didn't they learn about that in D.A.R.E.?

He pushes himself up off the ground and stumbles back into his bedroom, where his bed is stacked high with more discarded clothes and a bundle of blankets he's formed into a kind of nest. There's a full-length mirror on the back of his closet door.

He sees Eddie standing directly behind him.

"Fuck," Richie yelps, and whips around, but once again, there's no one there. He turns away from the mirror, chanting, _"No, no, no, no, no."_

"Richie, please, come on, don't be like that. I'm not trying to scare you. Fuck, man, I fucking hate this."

Richie peers through the gap between his glasses and his face, as if seeing Eddie blurry instead of clearly will make it easier. "What do you want?"

"I don't fucking know," the Eddie in his mirror says. "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here any better than you do. We were all in the cave, and then you… It…" Eddie shudders out a sigh, and when he speaks again he sounds so small and quiet it breaks Richie's heart all over again. "I died, didn't I, Rich?"

"Yeah, Eds," Richie says, still unable to face him. "Yeah, you did."

He hears Eddie breathe out again, like he's actually standing right next to him. He shivers, frozen in mingled fear and longing. "Fuck, man."

"Yeah, pretty much," Richie says.

"But you beat It? It's dead?"

"I don't know," Richie says, and he finally looks at the apparition in his mirror. It looks just like Eddie did when he died, minus the pallor of blood loss and the gaping wound, which is nice. He doesn't think he could handle seeing that again right now. But knowing how this thing operates, Eddie's likely to start bleeding from the mouth or crawling out of the mirror any second now. Better to be prepared for it. "We thought so."

"You really think I'm some kind of trick?"

"I know you are. It can look like anything, and you're dead, and I-- why wouldn't it be a trick?"

"I guess that makes sense," Eddie admits. "But I'm not a fucking fake, so quit yelling at me. Or ask me something about you only I would know or something."

"It knew everything about us, dipshit."

"Fuck you," Eddie says without any heat. "I can't believe I'm dead."

"You were really brave, Eddie," Richie says.

"I was really dead," Eddie says. "Being brave is for fucking idiots."

Richie is so surprised he can't help but laugh. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs, until tears are streaming from his eyes, and when he blinks them away Eddie is laughing too, clutching his sides, looking for all the world like he's sitting on Richie's bedroom floor, like when they were kids. Except Richie is forty, and Eddie is dead, and he's not really there.

"I'm out of my goddamn mind," Richie says, and he goes scrambling around the cluster of pill bottles on his nightstand for one that'll knock him out. "I can't deal with this right now."

"Richie, please, at least drink some water, you're gonna be so hungover."

"NyQuil is either going to send you back to your hole, or I'm going to sleep through being eaten by a clown. Either one is fine." Richie pops a couple of the blue capsules into his dry mouth and follows it with the last inch of a glass of tepid water. He tosses his glasses aside, crawls into his tousled bed, and covers his face. Childhood fear logic, like if he can't see Eddie, then he won't be there. He feels uncomfortably watched until the medicine kicks in and sleep overtakes him by force.

He feels like someone is digging their thumbs into his temples when he wakes up twelve hours later. He stumbles blearily into the kitchen, tripping over a pizza box and nearly braining himself on the edge of the counter. He flips on the faucet and puts his head under the stream, half letting cold water rush over his pounding head and half drinking like some kind of demented gerbil. Finally he removes his head, lank hair dripping onto his shirt and the linoleum floor, and sticks a glass under the faucet instead. He drinks one glass in about ten unbroken gulps and goes in for another before he shuts the water off.

He roots around in the fridge, which is down to tubs of leftover Chinese and a collection of half-used condiments, and withdraws one fourth of a jar of crinkle-cut pickles. He pops off the lid and gulps down the brine, letting the pickles remain.

After taking something for his headache and letting himself rehydrate for about a half an hour, he still feels like shit, but he almost feels human again, which is a relative improvement. He checks his phone-- a few missed spam calls, some unanswered texts from friends in LA he hasn't spoken to since… everything. He's effectively fallen off the face of the earth. His agency transferred full control of his Twitter account back to him, but if he's honest, he has no fucking idea how Twitter works. His mentions tab is full of strangers speculating on whether he's on a coke bender, or in rehab, or on a Scientology retreat, in addition to the usual mix of people poorly retelling his ghostwritten jokes or telling him he's an unfunny fuck. He closes the tab. He ought to just delete the fucking app, but now that he's got no one representing him but himself, he doesn't know how else to go about promoting himself.

He clicks off the phone's display and jolts when he sees a long, sad face next to his in the black reflection, and he drops his phone so that it slides across the floor and under the coffee table. He leaves it there and power-walks into the bedroom.

"I'm still here, asshat," Eddie mumbles. He's clearly visible in the mirror, leaning against the inside of his doorway. He's pouting, arms crossed.

"Fine. Fine!" Richie throws up his hands in defeat. "You win. Haunt me all you want. What other terrible secrets of mine should we dig up today, man? I cheated on my final exam in Mrs. Jordan's history class in senior year. I told everyone in the 4th grade that my family was descended from George Washington, but actually it was Warren Harding. I was the one who stole your Erasure cassette."

"I fucking knew it! You dick! I looked everywhere for that! My mom wouldn't let me get a new one because she told me I was 'too irresponsible'!"

"Yeah, well, you really liked them, so--"

"So, what, you wanted me to be that much more pissed off?"

"No, I…" Richie swallows hard. Why is he even talking to this stupid thing like it's Eddie? But it isn't spewing blood, or growing spider legs, or a mouth full of shark teeth or anything, so it's almost too easy to forget it isn't really him. "I wanted to listen to it because I knew you liked it. It reminded me of you." He runs his hand through his hair then smooths it over his face, a flimsy barrier between him and the face in the mirror. "Then I lost it somewhere, so I couldn't sneak it back into your stuff, and I never fessed up. There it is. My dark secret laid bare."

"Stupid," Eddie says. "You could've just asked. Bill would've copied it onto a blank for you."

"It was embarrassing! And I still can't listen to Erasure without feeling guilty, so thanks for that."

"Yeah, you're welcome." It's quiet for a long moment. Richie's afraid to move, afraid of the next shoe dropping. He chances a look at mirror-Eddie, who's just studying him with those same sad brown eyes. "You look different, Richie."

"You look exactly the same," Richie says, and turns to stalk back into the living room.

Eddie observes the wreckage of his apartment from the black screen of his television. "Dude, you live like this?"

"Fuck off," Richie says, but his heart's not in it. "I bet your house looks like a fucking Crate and Barrel catalog."

"Crate and Barrel has some nice shit, okay?" Richie falls onto the couch, where Eddie's specter appears to be sitting. It almost looks like Richie is falling into his lap, except for the part where he falls through him.

"Shouldn't you be there now, haunting Mrs. Kaspbrak the second?"

"Myra? I… I don't know. I mean, I'm not… I didn't come here on purpose. Also, shut up."

"Aw, babe, I'm touched."

"Anyway, she's fine. Like, I had a really good life insurance policy, so if I'm dead, she's… she's fine." Eddie-in-his-TV frowns down at his lap, like he's unhappy that he's not more unhappy. "It's weird. Being dead kind of takes the pressure off. I was worried about everything all the time before, but… there's kind of nothing left to worry about?"

"Yeah, totally, like why don't we all just die? That'd fix everything," Richie says, his throat closing up. He'd let his guard down too easily. "Is this your new tactic? Instead of scaring the shit out of us, convince us we'd all be better off--"

"No, no, I didn't-- fuck, I didn't mean it like that," Eddie says. His reflection gesticulates helplessly, like all he wants to do is grab Richie by the shoulders, but he can't find purchase.

"Whatever, if you're going to possess my TV and tell me to start killing everyone and then myself, you'd better just fucking do it, cause I'm tired of this shit," Richie says, and turns the TV on with an aggressive button smash. Eddie is abruptly displaced by reruns of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_. Richie leans back against the couch, tilting his head back, blinking rapidly and willing his eyes to dry.

\---

He agonizes over whether to call someone for a long time. Last he heard, they were all blissfully successful and moving on with their lives, and they didn't need Richie bringing everything back up like norovirus. He knows Bill is probably really busy with a press tour right about now, and Bev and Ben don't need his depressing ass bursting their little love bubble. He lands on Mike. Mike would understand. Mike would believe him without question. Mike probably wouldn't even judge him, if it turned out it wasn't the clown and was just a figment of Richie's sad, gay little mind, driven to delusion by grief. But Mike would also cancel his plans and call them all back for _Clown Con 2k16 Part Two, The Clownening_, and he doesn't want that.

He ends up calling Mike anyway, and it's great to hear his voice, even if Richie's talking around the fact that Eddie is watching him sadly, distorted in the curved reflection of his coffee maker. Mike's driven down the east coast and seen all the dumb touristy shit he can stand, and he's planning on making a turn towards Louisiana to meet up with Bill to do some research for his next book idea.

"I'm surprised he wants to stay on the road," Richie says. "I thought he and his wife would want some alone time after all the bullshit."

"Yeah," Mike says haltingly. "It's… I don't know, I think it's complicated right now."

"Oh," Richie says. Maybe Bill's having just as hard a time with it as he is. Hopefully not seeing Georgie's horrible screeching child-ghost in the backs of his spoons or anything. "He okay?"

"Yeah, he's okay," Mike says. "We're all trying to figure stuff out, I guess."

"Sure," Richie says. There's something lodged in his throat, and he purses his lips against the urge to let it out when he glances at Eddie, watching him from the corner of his eye. "Well, I ought to let you go. Send me a postcard or something. You don't have to write me any poetry though. And if you stay at the Motel 8 in Tallahassee, don't take off your shoes in the bathroom, cause that's how I got Hep C."

"Beep beep, Richie," Mike says with a laugh, and follows it with a solemnly sincere, "I love you."

"Gay," Richie says, but he doesn't let Mike go before he mumbles, "Love you, too."

\---

It turns out there's plenty for Eddie's ghost to worry about, after all.

"Do you know what a fire hazard your entertainment center is? You need a surge protector if you're going to have that many things plugged into one outlet," Eddie says, reflected in the glass of his framed _Blazing Saddles _poster. "All this trash you're living in won't help, either. You're sitting around eating nachos inside a tinderbox."

If Pennywise is trying to annoy him to death, it won't work. Nothing on this earth is more annoying than Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier. He will not be out-annoyed. He pops another chip into his mouth and talks while he chews.

"When you and your wife got going, did it just sound like your mom fucking herself in stereo?"

"Not funny, man. I'm serious. When's the last time you checked your smoke detector?"

"The last time you got pussy that didn't remind you of being born."

"This is Hell," Eddie says. "I am in Hell, and it's watching you waste your life in a condo full of garbage."

"That's right, Eduardo, it's just you and me and _Lakefront Bargain Hunt_ until global warming takes us all." Richie goes to take a sip of his beer, and finds it empty. He tips the can upside down over his mouth and it drips out onto his chin.

It goes on like this for a few days. Richie avoids showering, because even though Eddie probably saw him naked a hundred times when they were kids, he doesn't think he can handle Eddie's face gawking at him from the bathroom mirror while he lathers up, and Eddie nags him about it. He goes to bed at 2 AM, when he can't deal with the itch of Eddie watching him watch garbage television anymore, and when he wakes up at noon, Eddie is in his mirror, sitting next to him in bed, telling him he's messing up his circadian rhythms by staring at screens after dark. He finally hangs a t-shirt over the bathroom mirror when he has to take a dump, but swears he can see Eddie covering his eyes in the reflection on the faucet.

Eventually, Richie gives up. He's been quietly tensed for an attack that hasn't come, and he's wound up so tight he thinks he might pop. The back of his neck burns at the way he can feel Eddie watching him sit here surrounded by discarded takeout containers, inert on the couch, and after days of playing mental tug-of-war, he's just tired of it. He stomps into the kitchen, grabs a trash bag, and starts shoving shit into it indiscriminately.

"You win," he says. "I surrender, Eddie's ghost. I can't take your spectral judgment anymore. Maybe your unfinished business is dismantling my one-man landfill and your spirit can only move on once I finally take out the trash."

"You're such an asshole. I saved your life, the least you could do is tidy up before I haunt you."

A memory comes back to him: Eddie, eleven years old, seated on the edge of his bed on top of a t-shirt, asking him when the last time he washed his sheets or checked his mattress for bedbugs was. It fills him with such fondness he can't help but smile. He actually used to pick up his dirty clothes and everything before Eddie would come over, even though Eddie still found things to grouse at him about. Practically the only time he ever got any cleaning done was when Eddie was supposed to be there.

"Yeah, well, you should have sent me a text or something first to give me a heads up. At least some blood on the bathroom mirror. '_ON MY WAY, CHANGE YOUR WATER FILTERS_.'"

He hauls five bags of trash out to the dumpster in his unwashed lounging clothes and his slippers. He hasn't seen this much sun in ages, and he feels like a troll emerging from a cave. All of the sudden he's hyper-aware of how disgusting he is. He's gotta fucking wash his hair and get out of here as soon as possible. He hauls ass back up the stairs and starts tugging off clothes before he's even in the bathroom. Now that he's bothering to notice, he's pretty rank.

"Oh, wow, okay," Eddie says, and averts his eyes from the mirror.

"Yeah, take it all in, hot stuff. Get a good, long look." Richie grabs his pecs like they're a sizeable pair of breasts rather than his flat, hairy reality. "See what your mom's been missing."

"It had to be you," Eddie mutters, looking up at the ceiling. Richie closes the door to the shower, and Eddie releases a sigh. "At least you're finally bathing. I'm surprised you don't have a fungal infection."

"You wanna see a fungus, check out this toadstool," Richie says, and pushes the door open, flashing the mirror. Eddie yelps and Richie crows with laughter, gargling hot water and spitting it down the drain.

He missed this. He missed him. He can't believe he'd forgotten how much he missed Eddie for like, twenty goddamn years. Had Eddie missed him too, without knowing it? Had he ever, just by chance, seen Richie making someone else's jokes on TV and thought,_ something's missing?_ His laughter fades as he watches soapy water swirl down the drain.

"I wish you were here," he says, wet strings of hair dangling in front of his eyes. When he turns the water off and steps out, the mirror is too fogged to make out anything, with or without his glasses.

"I am," comes Eddie's voice, from somewhere behind him. "I'm right here."

\---

So Richie cleans up his place. He sweeps the floor, and dust-busts the couches and chairs, and washes his sheets, and makes the bed. Everything looks nice and clean and Kaspbrak-approved. He even goes outside and buys groceries, for once, and doesn't let Eddie talk him out of buying Diet Coke, no matter how many tumors those lab rats got from the aspartame. It's kind of nice, having Eddie around to nag him into cleaning up his act, even if he's a delusion of Richie's closet trauma. He always came up with better material when he had a straight man to torment. Ha. 'Straight man'.

All at once, the thought makes him powerfully miss Stan. Watching Stan roll his eyes and wearily deadpan his way through yet another of Richie's inappropriate outbursts was almost as fun as making Eddie squirm.

Lying in bed at night, his eyes drift over to the full length mirror. Eddie is sprawled out next to him in the bed, still dressed exactly as he has been since he appeared, since the last time Richie saw him alive.

"Is Stan with you?" he asks. His voice feels too loud in the quiet room, but also so fragile he'd be embarrassed if some part of him wasn't still sure he was just talking to himself.

"No," Eddie says. He holds Richie's gaze through the barrier of the mirror. "No, it's just me."

"Oh." Richie doesn't know what he would say anyway. He had been angry and hurt, months ago, and he'd said some stuff he hoped Stan couldn't hear, if he was anywhere at all. He doesn't know what he would say now. _I'm sorry,_ maybe? Or maybe he's still angry, because the next thought that comes to mind is, _Why the fuck would you think that leaving us would be better than staying? We needed you. We still do._

"Stan wasn't weak," Eddie says after a while.

"I know that," Richie says, even though he knows he hasn't made that evident. It still eats at him. "He was stronger than me. By like, a lot. I _wished _I had the balls Stan did. Not just to… to stand up for himself, like he did, but to just be… just be him. He was always just Stan, you know?"

"Yeah," Eddie says. He's staring so intently at him, eyes black in the darkness, that Richie has to look away, to stare at the ceiling.

"And if Stan couldn't-- I mean, he was like, my fucking hero, man. And if he couldn't-- if he--" Richie's throat closes around the rest, and he can't say it. He's talking to a figment of his imagination in the dark, in his room, in the middle of the night, and he still can't talk about it without seizing up.

"I know," Eddie says. In the mirror his ghost sits up and almost rests his hand on Richie's head, like he's petting his hair without being able to touch him, and when Richie sees that, the dam breaks. He sobs like he did back in the quarry, wet and hurt and exhausted, with everyone left in the world that he truly knew holding him. He curls up, and positions his head like it's in Eddie's lap, crying until he's heaving with it. Stan should have been there. He should be here now.

When he's too dehydrated and tired to cry anymore, his face and throat raw and red, Eddie is still sitting with him. He looks like he's been crying, himself. Can ghosts cry? Richie supposes weirder things have happened, mostly to him.

"Okay, I lied," Eddie says. His voice is tremulous in Richie's ear. "About it taking off the pressure or whatever. I hate this. This sucks. Being dead sucks."

"Why are you even here, man?" Richie croaks.

"I told you, I don't know. Maybe 'cause I was with you when I died, or something. Or 'cause-- I don't know. I wish I knew."

"I'm sorry I couldn't get you-- your body out of there. I tried. I tried to, but it was collapsing, and the others--"

"Hey, it's okay. You made it out. That's what I wanted." Eddie gives him a wet smile. Richie feels nauseous. "At least I'm not haunting that fucking drainpipe, like God, could you imagine? That's shit tier as far as haunting spots go, literally."

Richie laughs, and it turns into a cough. "Yeah, haunting a collapsed sewer full of dead kids is about the only thing worse than haunting the overpriced Los Angeles apartment of a D-list comedian with a waning career who's having a depressive episode."

"What the fuck did the cops do about that? Like, a sinkhole opening up in the middle of town…" Eddie's eyes widen, and he looks down at Richie in shock. "Richie, oh my God, you killed Henry Bowers."

"Yeah, thanks, I was trying to forget about that," Richie says, screwing up his face and closing his eyes, like that would erase the memory of splitting a guy's skull with an axe.

"How are the cops not after you right now?"

"Hey, chill, the security camera caught him attacking Mike. And he'd killed some people at the hospital, I guess, so it was open and shut. You know how Derry is, the cops there couldn't give half a shit anyway, but they could tell it was self-defense." Eddie looks placated, though not terribly comforted.

"I wish I could drink."

"If it makes you feel better, I can drink enough for both of us," Richie says, and rolls out of bed to fetch a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He returns to the bedroom with all three, pours two fingers into each glass, and sets them on the table next to the full length mirror. Richie holds one up to Eddie's reflection and taps. "Cheers." He repeats this with the second glass, and Eddie mimes clinking glasses with him.

"This is truly pathetic," Eddie says as Richie knocks back each glass in succession. "I'm vicariously living through a guy drinking whiskey in his underwear in the middle of the night."

"I'll get some M&Ms and eat those for you, too, Eds. I'm not gonna jerk off for you, though, there are lines. I know you're gagging for it, but I don't want any spectral jizz on my mirrors."

"Shut the fuck up," Eddie says, trying to hold back a smile. 

"Do ghosts come ectoplasm? Like, there's only one way to find out, I guess, but am I willing to take that risk?"

"Beep beep, Richie!"

Richie plants a big, wet whiskey kiss on the mirror, rolling back into bed. Eddie's laughter sands down the rough edges of everything that keeps him awake at night, even though there's one big, glaring thing left that's so much a part of the landscape of his heart, he doesn't quite know how to approach it. For now, his laugh is enough. It always made him feel invincible before.

\---

The problem is that Richie Tozier is still very much in love with Eddie Kaspbrak.

When had he realized he loved Eddie? The moments leading up to the realization were too numerous to pin down, the act itself of falling in love too complex. Eddie hadn't been in his and Bill's and Stan's kindergarten class-- that was the year his father passed away, and his mother's reaction had been to keep Eddie out of school entirely, so they didn't meet until the first grade. Richie had zeroed in on him almost immediately, obsessed with getting Eddie to notice him. At six, Eddie already looked like a miniature adult, so serious and preoccupied. If there was ever a kid who needed to loosen up a little, it was him. And it was so easy to get a rise out of him. Stan would never go along with Richie's bullshit, but Eddie just kept taking the bait, and it was worth it every time.

It'd be six years before he connected the dots, before he realized that girls weren't just something you joked about to sound cool to everyone else, or to make your high-strung friend roll his eyes and shove your shoulder with your name on his lips, _Richie_, like you're an idiot, but you're his idiot. He thought everybody felt that way about boys they wanted to be friends with, breathless and excited and seeking their attention like a plant growing toward the sun.

The problem was it wasn't just Eddie, and he wasn't the only one who noticed that he looked a little too long, got attached a little too soon and a little too fast. It became unignorable, that the things people called him and his friends to make them small meant something real, something true, in his case.

He hadn't even connected it to Eddie right away. He remembers now, the moment when it clicked. The clubhouse, Stan's goofy shower caps, Richie hogging the hammock, and Eddie climbing in with him in protest, practically on top of him. His skinny little legs kicking and thrashing against him, his socked foot tapping his cheek, kicking his glasses off his nose. Eddie comfortably teasing him as easily as Richie had ever teased Eddie. His entire body had gone hot, and his skin burned where it touched Eddie's. He wanted to touch him more, pull him in closer, and the thought made his heart do a flip, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move. It was like finally switching to the right lens in an eye exam, when all the blurry shapes suddenly turned into letters, and everything made sense.

Seeing him again at Jade of the Orient was just the same. Two-plus decades of his life gone by, trying to be what he thinks he's supposed to be and talking so much trash he couldn't distinguish his life from a bit anymore, and then Eddie Kaspbrak is there, a forty year old dweeb whose body finally caught up with his personality, and it all crashes right back in on him, like nothing ever changed.

Watching the guy you've been in love with for thirty-some-odd years (give or take a prolonged bout of amnesia) die in front of you was not high on Richie's list of fun things to do on your summer vacation, so he guessed it shouldn't have been a surprise that it drove him absolutely batshit out-of-his-mind crazy. And even if he's not losing it, if this is real, and not something his brain constructed to help him cope, he's not sure he wants to tell the others. He doesn't want to share Eddie with anyone. Not yet. He knows it's selfish, but he absolutely hadn't been ready to let go before, and like fuck was he going to do it now.

Other people can't seem to see him, or at least other people who haven't looked into the face of cosmic horror and lived, so Eddie's like his own personal director's commentary when he goes back into the world to try to be a person again. Which is good, because as it turns out, Richie fucking hates all of his friends.

Not the Losers-- they're about the only people left in his life that he doesn't hate. Now that he's falling out of favor professionally, there's suddenly a lot of people who just won't answer his calls. The ones who will, he's realizing, are kind of huge assholes. He spends a few nights out with one of his usual groups, dropping in on some shows, and it all leaves the worst taste in his mouth. Everyone's got irony poisoning, too obsessed with being the one who cares the least, seemingly terrified of expressing any genuine sincerity. Richie feels like he's looking into a fucked up funhouse mirror at himself, seeing the thing he's tried to shape himself into for his entire adult life. He'd always masked himself behind a veil of sarcasm; the kids in the Losers' Club balanced him out in the way he hadn't realized he needed just by being unafraid to give a shit.

"So I pulled in front of the guy," one of the assholes is saying, "And he's in this faggy little Prius, ‘cause of course he is-- and he starts revving up on me all pissed off, like he's gonna get past me in that thing. Like, I've seen Barbie Power Wheels with more juice."

"Wow, dude, your dick must be massive," Eddie says over Richie's shoulder. Richie covers the smile that breaks out on his face with his hand, nodding along.

"And then the little princess actually rolls down his window to bitch at me. Like, _'Ooooh, you!'_"

"He knows how to do that voice 'cause it's the same one his girlfriends use when they fake an orgasm," Eddie says, and Richie actually has to smother a snorting laugh, which unfortunately the others take as tacit approval of their unfunny 2002-called-they-want-their-jokes-back asses.

Richie finds an excuse to leave early into the night. If he has to hear one more quip about how triggered someone is, he's actually going to end up punching somebody.

"Those guys are a bunch of fucking tools, why'd you even start hanging out with them?" He can see Eddie flipping them double birds in shop windows as they walk.

"You really think I'm different from them?" Richie shoves his hands in his pockets, earbuds in but plugged into nothing, so that it looks like he's talking on his phone instead of to Eddie's reflection in the shop windows as he walks by. "I mean, isn't that all I do, rag on you and talk about fucking your mom?"

"It's different," Eddie says.

"You didn't see my Netflix special."

"Yeah, uh… I mean, I did. It sucked. Sorry, man. But that shit wasn't you. You didn't even write it."

"That kind of makes it worse."

"So write your own shit. Change it. Make it you. You're still alive, aren't you?"

Richie stops and turns, staring intently at Eddie reflected in the cluttered windowpane of a bodega. "I love you, Edward Kaspbrak," he says.

"Yeah, I know," Eddie says.

"I mean it. I fucking love you."

"That's why it's different," Eddie says. Like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

\---

Eddie doesn't understand. Their friends are all such saps; two decades or more apart, but they're still telling each other they love each other like little kids, in a way Richie's never experienced with any of his post-Derry relationships. Even when he was trying to date women, who wanted a level of investment from him he could never seem to give, none of them were this touchy-feely. He likes it. It's refreshing and transformative and _powerful_, having people who aren't afraid to just love him, forsaking humiliation and shame as a concept.

But of course Eddie doesn't understand that Richie, with his layers upon layers of sarcasm, means it in a different way, when he says he loves Eddie. By the grace of some higher power, Eddie hasn't seen his internet search history yet, or else he might've second-guessed that. Thank God he hasn't really wanted to jerk off since everything happened, though having the guy he's apparently still stupidly, pointlessly in love with babbling in his ear all the time is likely to make an end of that sooner or later. Having jerk off fantasies about people he knew, especially Eddie, wasn't really on his radar when he was a kid, but a lot had changed since then, when it was all such a nebulous idea, purely in the realm of the hypothetical. He hadn't even really known what things men did with each other, outside of the usual jokes. Now he knows, and he's even done a few of them, though maybe not as many as he'd like. It's too easy to imagine that Eddie is really in the shower with him, that they're really waking up together, that their banter over breakfast is something he'd do with a live-in boyfriend, if he had the guts to admit that was what he wanted.

He doesn't know why it's still hard. He knows his real friends are beyond judging him, at this point, and he knows that even if it ended his career he wouldn't really give a shit, because there were always going to be four people who would let him crash with them until he figured something out, no questions asked. But forty years of fear means the common pathways are worn and comfortable, and veering off of them, even when he knows there's no impact coming, goes against every instinct he has.

So he doesn't call Mike, or Bev, or anyone else to tell them, and he and Eddie just keep on like it's normal to have your dead friend chilling in every reflective surface within ten feet of you. And the weirdest part is, Eddie isn't complaining. He never asks when Richie's going to call the others, to try to figure out how to send him back wherever he came from, and Richie's not going to be the one to suggest he ought to. The only shit Eddie complains about is Richie himself, like all of the anxiety Eddie had built up over a lifetime of trauma-induced hypervigilance had now transferred onto Richie.

"Eddie, my love, I'm gonna need you to hop off my jock. I know I'm irresistible, but I'm starting to chafe."

"Read the expiration date on that shit. I want you to pick that jar up and read the expiration date to me."

"They're fucking pickles, Eds, they don't go bad."

"Does it or does it not say two-thousand motherfucking eight on that jar of pickles?"

"They're vintage. I think I stole them from my old roommate two moves ago, actually, but they're still good." Richie punctuates the statement by plucking a slice from the jar and popping it into his mouth like it's a cherry, even though the sourness makes his face contort.

"Fucking-- do you _want _to get botulism?"

"Yeah, man. You think I can charge some of these Hollywood fucks money to inject my pickle juice into their faces?" He pops another pickle into his mouth and replaces the lid, tossing the jar back into the fridge.

"I'm trying to look out for you, it's like you're trying to destroy your body on purpose."

"Whatever you say, Mrs. K." 

"If I was my mom, you would've fucked me by now," Eddie mutters, and rolls his eyes. Richie's brain comes to a screeching stop.

"What'd you say?" He has to be hallucinating this, because there's no way Eddie just said…

"I said maybe I am my mom, because you fuck me every day with these shitty fucking jokes, dude," Eddie says. Richie holds the coffee pot up to his eyes, but Eddie's reflection won't look at him. "God."

Richie lets it go, but it simmers in the back of his mind for days, coloring everything he says, everything he thinks. And yeah, it is officially impossible to ignore how inconvenient and distracting it is to have Eddie over his shoulder all the time now that _that's _in his head. He can't even touch Eddie, not that he would risk it, but there's also never a time when he's alone that he can, you know, work off his frustration and then pretend it never happened so they can go back to normal, everyday, unhorny haunting.

He's lying in bed, seriously considering whether he should cover every reflective surface in the apartment for just, like, an hour so he can take care of business, but instead he blurts out, "Can you just… leave?"

Eddie looks at him sharply, the lines on his forehead deepening as he frowns. "You want me to leave?"

"No, not like-- I don't mean forever, just like. Can you? At all? Do you know how?"

"I'm trying not to think about it," he says, and then looks like he regrets having said it. "No, I don't know how."

"Isn't that kind of fucked up?" Richie's not one to question a good thing, or at least a weird thing that's better than a catastrophically bad thing, but he's starting to get really freaked out that Eddie "Two Fanny Packs" Kaspbrak isn't formulating fifteen contingency plans for undoing whatever weird cosmic fuckery trapped his soul in mirror-world.

"If you want me to go, then say so. Call Mike or someone. I told you I don't fucking know why I'm here."

"I don't want you to go, I'm just-- you really aren't worried at all about it? It doesn't make any sense to me, Eddie."

"Well, I mean, of course I'm worried about it, who the fuck wouldn't be worried about it, it's perfectly fucking natural to be worried about it!" Eddie is practically shouting.

"Calm down, man--"

_"I am calm!"_

"Okay, yeah, totally, you're calm, dude, no doubt." Richie sits up, approaching the mirror cautiously. It absolutely fucking sucks that he can't grab Eddie's shoulder or something right now, cause that's all he wants to do.

Eddie is hanging back, frozen, almost folding in on himself with his head descending between his shoulders. He looks like he's about to hyperventilate. If he had it, he'd probably be puffing on his inhaler.

"Eddie," Richie says, resting the tips of his fingers against the mirror. All he touches is his own hand reflected back at him. "What's going on?"

"You don't still think I'm fake, do you?" Eddie's voice is so small it makes Richie's chest ache. "You do. You think I'm like, some kind of--"

"No, Eddie--"

"--some kind of delusion, or, or, or something It made up to--"

"No, Eddie, I don't, I don't think that--"

"--p-please, Rich, you gotta believe me--"

"Eddie, Eddie, look at me! Look at me!" Richie slaps the wall next to the mirror, resting his head on the other side of it so that he can give Eddie room to get closer, almost like they're sitting next to each other instead of being separated by a pane of glass. Eddie's chin is wobbling, his eyes darting around like he doesn't know where to focus. "Look at me, Eddie. I believe you. I'm sorry I didn't. I believe you now. You think that fucking clown could fool me again? I know you, man. Of course I know you." Richie gives him a little smile. "You're the only one who's always been funnier than me."

Eddie finally comes closer, close enough for Richie to really see him. His eyes haven't changed at all, big and brown and heartbreaking. Eddie rests his forehead against the mirror, like he's on the other side of a window.

"I'm sorry," Eddie says, distraught. "I never wanted to freak you out. I just wanted-- you seemed so-- I wanted to help. I wanted to-- to stay with you. Like you stayed with me, when I... I mean, I owed you that much."

Richie breathes out hard, trying to hold in how much he wants to pull Eddie close to him, to feel him breathing instead of still and limp. An impossible want.

"You don't owe me shit," he says, shaking his head. "Are you kidding me?"

"No, Richie, I'm not fucking kidding you," Eddie cries. "I froze. I watched you almost die, twice, and I let it happen. You coulda ran at any time, to, to get away, or to go fight, but you stayed with me, you stayed and held onto me, so I wasn't alone and looking at, at that thing when I…" His breath shudders. Richie wishes he could feel it against his cheek.

"You saved my life," Richie said. "What the fuck do you have to apologize for? The last few months would've been hell on earth if you hadn't snapped me the fuck out of it. I--" Richie swallows, trying to summon his balls from wherever they're hiding. "I love you."

"I love you, too, Rich," Eddie says weakly, but Richie shakes his head, shutting his eyes tight against the terrible decision he's about to make.

"No, Eds, you don't-- I mean, I really fucking love you. I think I've been in love with you for like, thirty fucking years."

Eddie blinks rapidly at him. Richie forgets to breathe.

"What… You… What?"

"Maybe it was longer than that? I don't know. I've had a thing for you since like, first grade."

_"You what?"_

Richie covers his face with his hands, feeling like it sure would be swell if the ground opened up and swallowed him. "Fucking Christ."

"But you-- you-- you were always giving me shit and talking about fucking my mother!"

"That was like, our love language, man," Richie moans.

"All you ever _did _was give me shit! You were in _love _with me?"

"Well, what was I supposed to do, take you to the fucking prom?" Is it too late for Richie to jump out his window?

"I don't know! Maybe!" Eddie is going on before Richie can ask him what the fuck he means by that. "Why the fuck didn't you say anything?"

"In Derry? With Bowers and those other fuckers hanging around, are you shitting me? The shit they said about me, about all of us, do you think I wanted anyone to know they were right? And besides, you were so scared out of your mind about like, AIDS and shit, your mom even called it _'gay cancer'_. Like, did you really think I was going to say anything after that?"

"God fucking damn it, Richie," Eddie says, and pounds a fist against the mirror. "You were the one who made AIDS jokes! All you ever did was talk about girls and, and pussy!"

"Yeah, well, I needed to do _something _to distract everyone from what a big fucking homo I was."

Eddie silently mouths, '_Homo?'_ like he can't actually process what's coming out of Richie's mouth right now. Richie nods like, '_Yeah, homo.'_

"Dammit, fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck." Eddie rests his forehead against the glass and gently bangs his head against it.

"I shouldn't've said anything, just, please forget about it, and you can go haunt your motherwife and we can pretend this never happened," Richie whines, and puts his head between his knees, covering it with his arms. If Eddie really didn't know how to leave, he was sure as fuck going to wish he did now.

"No, I'm not going to just forget about it, asshole! Why didn't you tell me, maybe we could've…"

When Richie looks up, Eddie's hand is covering his eyes, his mouth contorted into a deep frown.

"Could've _what?"_

"I dunno," Eddie mumbles. "I… I really liked you, you dumbfuck, I wish you would've told me."

"What?" Richie feels lightheaded.

"I thought you were cool, for some fucking reason! It was like nothing scared you--"

_"Me?_ I was the most cowardly, Scooby-Doo piece of shit--"

"--and I just wanted you to like me, Rich, I spent so much time worrying about if I was like, impressive enough, or cool enough to hang out with you, and I didn't really know what that meant until…"

Richie can barely feel his hands. "Until?"

"I told you, man, I watched you almost die. Like, more than once. I watched it happen, and I couldn't move, and when it was over all I could think was, 'I love him so much, and I almost lost him forever, because I'm a pussy'." Eddie looks absolutely miserable, unable to look Richie in the eye. "And you weren't even mad. You just forgave me. You told me I was brave. I didn't want to let you down."

Richie's mouth fills with hot saliva, and he scrambles out of the bedroom, banging his elbow on the doorway trying to make it into the bathroom, where he throws up violently, mostly into the toilet. This conversation is too much, and his body has decided to reject it.

"Richie? Richie, what the fuck, are you okay? God damn it, Richie, I _told _you you were going to get botulism if you ate those fucking pickles!"

"I don't have--" Richie croaks, and then throws up a little more. He burps horribly.

"Ugh, gross," Eddie says from the bathroom mirror. "I can't believe I want to kiss you."

Richie's stomach lurches, and he dry heaves, clutching the cold toilet bowl. "Whgk," he says.

Eddie is uncharacteristically quiet while Richie voids the rest of the contents of his stomach, breathing slow with his cheek against the seat until he's sure he's not going to cough up anything else, and then shakily stands to wash his mouth out in the sink, gargling and spitting until the burn in his throat subsides a little bit. He takes off his glasses and splashes his face with cold water, sliding a hand over it and through his sweaty hair.

"Do you feel any stiffness in your limbs?" Eddie asks after letting Richie collect himself.

"Should've asked me that an hour ago," Richie says weakly, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

"Paralysis, difficulty breathing, swallowing, or speaking, and nausea and vomiting are all--"

"I don't fucking have botulism, dude, I'm just gay." Richie freezes with his hands on either side of the sink, staring into the drain. That's the first time he's said it out loud. "I wanna take like, twenty showers." He puts his glasses back on in time to see that apparently ghosts can blush.

"Should I leave?"

"Should-- You just told me you don't know how to leave!"

"Well-- no, I don't, but like-- you just told me you're in love with me, am I supposed to keep watching you shower now?"

"You've been watching me shower?!"

"It's impossible not to, fucknuts," Eddie barks.

Richie stares intently at Eddie's face in the mirror. Rewinds, replays the conversation they just had in his head.

"Do you _want _to watch me shower?"

"I dunno! Maybe!"

"Okay," Richie says, and takes off his shirt before he can second guess himself. His shirt drops to the floor, and then he just stands there, in his boxers, vomit on his toilet seat, in front of the man he's been in love with since grade school, who is also a ghost living in his bathroom mirror. The absurdity of the situation makes it impossible to know what is and is not an appropriate reaction. "Uh," he says after a minute. He reaches over to flush the toilet. Eddie buries his face in his hands.

"This is so weird."

"What about us has ever been normal," Richie says. "Sorry I threw up in front of you."

"The fact that it's about the least sexy scenario I can possibly imagine, and I still want to see you naked, should reassure you that it's not an issue."

"I gotta be honest, I'm so fucking exhausted, I really think I might fall asleep in the shower," Richie says. "I'm gonna wash off and brush my teeth and fall into a coma, probably."

"You brushing your teeth would actually make me feel so much better," Eddie says.

So Richie drops his boxers and takes of his glasses and brings his toothbrush into the shower to brush the living shit out of his teeth until his mouth is more sterile than it's ever been in his life and he no longer feels like he just got done barfing his heart out of his guts. And Eddie just stays there, watching him from the water-dappled fixtures, without any real purpose or intent, quietly taking him in as if his forty year old self with his pale, noodly, utterly unremarkable physique is worth observation. Richie's not turned on anymore, he's too wrung out for that, but it makes him feel warm and comfortable in a way it has no right to. Was this what he'd been so scared of for so long?

He towels off, and doesn't bother re-dressing. He walks into the bedroom stark naked and starts to lift up his nightstand, hauling it over to the far corner of the room.

"What're you…" Eddie trails off, following his nude form with his eyes as Richie starts to push his bedframe so that it sits up against the corner wall, scraping against the hardwood. Then he removes the full length mirror from the back of his closet door to rest it on its side, lengthways, against the wall on top of his bed. He slides under the covers, inching up so that he's lying next to it.

In the mirror, Eddie lays down next to him, on top of the covers, head next to his on the pillow.

"Go ahead and go to sleep, Rich," Eddie says in his ear. "I'll stay with you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, of course I will."

It's been decades since he fell asleep to the sound of Eddie's breathing. How could he have forgotten how good it was?

\---

He dreams of Eddie asleep on his bed.

It's 1:43 AM, and Richie's been staring at the TV so long his eyes feel dry and kind of painful when he finally disengages from _Ninja Gaiden_ to realize how late it is. He switches everything off, letting his eyes adjust in the darkness.

Bev had been the first to move away, to live with her aunt on the opposite end of the country. He thinks she used to write, mostly to Bill or sometimes Ben, before he left too, but he hasn't heard any news in a couple of years. Ben and his mom found their own place somewhere further south, in Massachusetts, and he hasn't called or written in ages. Even Bill is gone now-- maybe his parents couldn't stand living in that old house with Georgie's room sitting there empty anymore, because they sold it and took Bill away to upstate New York last summer. Bill sent all of them still here in Derry a letter over the holiday, one for each of them, a few pages long and full of drawings of his new teachers and classmates with funny little anecdotes about each of them.

Mike got his GED, but since his grandfather had passed, his uncle seemed to need his help on the farm all the time, and they didn't get to see him as much as they wanted. He'd talked about trying to apply to schools outside of Derry, but it was hard with no money saved up and nothing to put on a college application. It doesn't seem fair, but Mike has a sense of duty and loyalty that is only rivaled by Bill's, so on the farm he stays.

Stan had been in deep shit with his dad for ages after his absolutely spectacular (in Richie's opinion) bar mitzvah, and even more so after turning up at home smelling like a sewer with gashes all over, but things had cooled down eventually, even though his parents never let him stay over at anyone else's house anymore. Stan, being the most serious guy Richie knows, already has a few good prospects as far as colleges go, so he'll probably end up being the most successful one out of all of them.

And then there was Eddie, who had been grounded for like, a year after cursing at and running out on his mother, who forbade him from seeing any of his friends ever, ever, ever again. He doesn't know what Eddie did to convince her to let up on that decree, but he thinks he must have spent that entire year sucking up to her and taking whatever bullshit medicine she was convinced he needed to be on, which made Richie a little bit crazy, but it wasn't in his power to stop Eddie's mom from being a controlling piece of shit. He still has to call her once at night and once in the morning for his daily guilt trip if he wants to stay over.

Richie just wants to go to school as far away from Derry as possible. California seems like the place to be, so many more people and places and opportunities than this nowhere shithole. It's warm and sunny all the time in California, and he's pretty sure nobody out there's going to call him a faggot just for looking at them. But Eddie would never go to California; his mother would never allow him to go so far from home, especially not to a "dirty," "dangerous" place like California, and he's pretty sure Eddie's not in a place where he's ready to argue that right now, even though they both turn eighteen next year.

Eddie's breath stutters a little in his sleep. Richie's had a night light that looks like the Death Star since he was eight, and it's casting a faint amount of warm light onto the side of his face. His dark eyelashes fan out on his pale cheeks, fluttering. He's gotten longer and sharper in the last few years, though Richie shot up like a beanpole long before the rest of them, and Eddie still hasn't caught up. He's got the faintest hint of a mustache coming in on his upper lip, and a dimple in his cheek that might be a wrinkle in ten years. His hair is sticking up oddly against the bed. Richie thinks he's probably the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

Richie lays his arm on the side of the bed and rests his head against it. This close, he can feel Eddie breathing out through his nose, stirring against the hair on his upper arm, making it stand on end. A shiver runs from the top of his scalp all the way down to his toes.

He wants to kiss him. He wants to kiss Eddie all the time, pretty much, but right now it would be so easy to just reach out, brush a little of that dark hair away from his forehead, and lean in. He can't, and he won't, but it's hard not to imagine it when he's right there looking so sweet and peaceful.

The two of them don't really fit in Richie's twin anymore. Richie himself barely fits in it now that he's hit six feet, and Eddie usually rolls a sleeping bag out on his floor rather than taking his bed. But he'd fallen asleep unintentionally, laid out on top of the covers in his jeans, in the dip in the mattress left by Richie's body over the last decade. Richie licks his lower lip and follows it with his teeth.

Sometimes, when he really gets Eddie going on some tirade or another, he thinks about tugging him in by the collar and planting one on him to shut him up. Other times, like when they're at the movies together and Eddie won't stop critiquing the survival skills of whoever's on the screen, he thinks about sneaking his arm around the back of Eddie's chair and leaning in, tasting popcorn and jujubes on his mouth, making him forget what he was complaining about. Richie's gotten really good at denying himself around Eddie, though he can't resist ruffling his hair or slinging an arm around his shoulder to wrestle him around a little bit every now and then. He's just so fucking cute when he's flustered.

Eddie's eyes flutter open. Richie stops breathing, his heart caught in his throat. 

"What're you doing?" Eddie's voice is quiet and sleepy, muffled by his cheek against the quilt.

"You fell asleep, you're hogging the bed, dickweed," Richie whispers in lieu of an answer, because "watching you sleep" is not an answer anyone wants to give and definitely not one anyone wants to hear. Eddie closes his eyes, frowning.

"I don't feel like getting the sleeping bag out now," he says.

"Well I'm not going to get it. It's my bed. It's covered in my dead skin cells and shit, I should get to sleep in it."

"Ugh, beep beep, motherfucker. You're so disgusting," Eddie says, but he just covers his face with his arm and doesn't move. "Whatever, who cares, just get up here."

"What, you want me to snuggle you back to sleep, Eddie Spaghetti? I'll be a poor substitute for your mom, my tits aren't nearly as great as hers," Richie says, and he hops onto the bed, wrapping his arms around Eddie and giving him a squeeze.

"Augh! Fuck, get off," Eddie says, thrashing a little while Richie clings to him like a leech, elbowing him in the stomach. Richie coughs, laughing, and releases him. "Don't fucking call me that."

"As you wish, Edward Spaghedward," Richie says, resting on his side. Eddie scoots over closer to the wall, letting Richie take up more space, then folds up his elbow to lay his head on it like a pillow. Richie wants to let him have the one pillow that's actually on the bed, but he's afraid of looking even the slightest bit suspicious right now, so he rolls over to face away from Eddie and takes the pillow himself.

The warm line of Eddie's forearm presses up against his back, like this, his legs brushing Richie's by accident when one of them moves. Richie is supposed to be trying to sleep, but his heart is thudding erratically as he stares out into his dimly lit room. Eddie is so close he can feel his warm breath on the back of his neck, evening out and deepening as he falls back to sleep. Is it possible to die of wanting someone to touch you? Richie thinks he's in real danger of that, if this keeps up.

He closes his fist around the corner of the pillow, trying to match the cadence of Eddie's breathing. Everything slows down, his world shrinking to just his bedroom, to just the few square feet of his bed, to the bare inches between his body and Eddie's, to the molecules of Eddie's arm pressed against his shoulderblade.

He falls asleep like that, wondering what things might be like if he were just a little bit braver.

\---

Richie Tozier wakes up, forty years old, his hair still slightly damp against his pillow, feeling more in his skin than he has since he was a kid.

He reaches over to the bedside table for his glasses, and finds that the bedside table is gone, a pane of glass in its place, and then he remembers.

"You left them in the bathroom," comes Eddie's voice in his ear, and all at once, Richie is aware of how hard he is under the blankets. Oh, God.

"Good morning, Eddie Spaghetti," Richie chirps in a sing-song voice, his lip tugging up at the corner into a smirk. He wishes he could more clearly see the sour face Eddie is probably pulling.

"Oh, not that shit again," Eddie mutters, but he sounds softer and fonder than he might otherwise.

"You didn't watch me sleep, did you, Sting?"

"Like I have anything better to do."

"Guess it was your lucky night." Richie throws his arms back and crosses them behind his head, giving Eddie a squinting, bleary-eyed wink. He can practically hear Eddie rolling his eyes.

"You know you snore like a moose getting fucked in the ass by a tractor trailer?"

"Yeah, talk dirty to me," Richie groans, arching his back comically, but there's a tense undercurrent to it, given his situation. He laughs nervously. "Look, I'm gonna level with you, Eds, I wanna go get my glasses but if I get up you're gonna get more of a show than you bargained for. It's full Oktoberfest down here right now."

Eddie looks a little bit like he's choking when he says, "No, hey, uh, go ahead, I don't, uh, I don't mind."

Richie runs his tongue over his lip, studying Eddie's blurry profile in the mirror. He's made a lot of jokes about the relative impressiveness of his dick. Exaggerating its good qualities had strictly been a childhood behavior and, very briefly, a Grindr behavior; in his professional life, those sort of jokes don't do nearly as well as ones about how ugly and pathetic it is. For some reason it kills when you get up on stage to self-flagellate for thirty minutes.

In reality, he's never had any particular feelings one way or the other about his dick. From what he's gathered, it's just a dick like any other, perfectly average and unremarkable. He's also never had any particular hangups about showing it to people he's involved with, which is why it's so confusing that he is so goddamn nervous about letting Eddie see it. Eddie's seen his dick before! Granted, they were teenagers skinny-dipping in a cold man-made lake, or pissing off the side of a cliff, or things along those lines. This is undeniably, massively different.

But you know what? Fuck it. What has he got to lose? Richie throws back the blankets and rolls out of bed, strutting to the bathroom with his hard dick proudly jutting out. He's pale and untoned and starting to sag, he's never once gotten a compliment about his body, but for some reason he's feeling pretty impressive right now.

He slides his glasses back on to find that Eddie's eyes are the size of saucers and focused somewhere in the vicinity of his navel. They dart up as Richie's vision clears. Richie holds him there for a moment, hearing his pulse thud in his ear, feeling the flutter of it in his chest. He hasn't been this giddy about anything since… since before Eddie died, he realizes. Maybe since they were kids.

"What're you thinking, Spaghetti Man?" Richie says softly. Eddie's stunned look breaks just a bit. He holds back a smile and rolls his eyes.

"I'm thinking you're all talk, motherfucker. Is that the show? I expected a little bit more."

"Challenge accepted, bitch," Richie says, jabbing his finger at the mirror. He struts back into the bedroom, rifles through the nightstand he moved across the room to find his lube, and squirts a good amount into his hand. It makes the most unpleasant sound imaginable, and Richie doesn't even give a shit, high on adrenaline and hormones. He hops back onto the bed with a glop of warming lube in his fist, stretching out on top of the covers and angling himself toward the full length mirror so that Eddie, who appears to be lying behind him, can see him in full.

He has, until this moment, truthfully believed his dick to be nothing special, but the way Eddie is looking at him like he's a full course dinner makes him think, _YES, BEHOLD MY DICK! _Which unfortunately, he says out loud, breaking whatever spell Eddie had been under the moment before.

"I swear to God, you're still literally twelve years old," he sighs.

"That makes you a fuckin' perv," Richie says. Eddie's about to snap a reply when Richie shuts him up by giving himself a good, long stroke, drawing his palm over the head of his dick and smearing lubrication along its length. Eddie's jaw drops just the slightest bit. Richie bites his lip, following Eddie's eyes as they follow the slow movement of his hand. "What'cha thinking now, bud?"

"Huh?" Eddie is completely distracted, which does, in fact, make Richie feel like a Sex God even though he's literally just jerking himself off in a mirror. That's the power of love, as Huey Lewis would say.

"I'm curious," Richie says, thrusting into his hand a little bit for Eddie's benefit, "does this count as cheating?"

"What the fuck," Eddie says, his eyes darting back and forth between Richie's eyes and his dick. He's flushed, and there's an adorable wrinkle between his eyebrows. "No, it's not cheating, I'm not even touching you. And I'm fucking dead."

"Yeah, but like, it's still kind of cheating. Emotionally." Richie groans, reaching down to fondle his balls. "But whatever, it's cool. I'll cuck your wife."

"Don't-- _Don't fucking talk about my wife while you're masturbating!"_ Eddie hisses, the beautiful hypocrite.

"Then give me something better, huh, Eddie? Take off that sexy little polo."

"I--" Eddie freezes. "I don't think I-- can?"

"What?"

"I don't think I can… change… how I look. I think I'm, like… stuck this way."

"What the fuck, that's no fucking fair!" Richie stops moving, holding the base of his dick with one hand and gesturing with the other. "You get to see me naked!"

"You've seen me naked before, Rich," Eddie mutters.

"Yeah, dude, when we were like, fourteen. Show me that fuckin' dadbod!"

"Da-- I'm not a fucking dad, Richie!"

"Does that mean I can't call you 'daddy'?"

Eddie's reflection actually rolls over to plant its face down into the pillow. He hears Eddie's completely unmuffled scream behind him, and it makes him cackle victoriously.

"Eddie, darling, sweetie-pie, sugarplum, please don't be mad. You know I tease 'cause I just love you so fucking much."

Eddie rolls over, covering his face with his hand. "Yeah," he says. "I guess I do know that now." His fingers part, his eyes glittering darkly between them at Richie. His heart leaps; his dick follows suit. Eddie inches forward, until he appears to be resting right behind Richie, his head over Richie's shoulder. Richie can't feel him there, but the image is affecting, making it so easy to pretend. "Okay," Eddie says, quietly focused. "Keep going."

Well, damn, how can Richie say no? He gives himself a stroke, and then another, and soon enough he's got a rhythm going, the room now quiet except for the slick sound of his hand and his breathing. He shudders out a sigh, drawing his lip between his teeth. Eddie's eyes aren't glued to the movement of his hand anymore; they're focused completely on Richie's.

"Christ, Eddie," Richie whispers.

"Can I tell you something?" Eddie's voice in his ear makes him gasp a little, and he'd be more embarrassed if he wasn't so close to losing himself entirely. His hand speeds up almost subconsciously, and he nods, unable to speak. "The year we graduated high school… You remember that shirt you always used to wear, that ugly red and yellow ringer that made you look like a hot dog?"

Richie hadn't remembered it until literally that very second; his rhythm falters. "Okay, first of all, I did not look like a _hot dog,_ I--"

"Yeah, you did, you fucking wiener. Ketchup and mustard. But that's not important," Eddie says. "I… I stole it."

"You _what?"_ Richie's mouth falls open. "I can't _believe _you had the gall to give me shit about stealing your tape, you clothes-thief. I loved that fucking shirt."

"I know you did," Eddie says, "and you wore it literally all the goddamn time. But you left it at my house one time, and I… I just kind of, kept it. I shoved it in my drawer and didn't tell you. And when I moved away for college, I sort of… brought it… with me?"

"You brought my shirt with you to school?"

"Yeah, I did. And I… fuck, I can't believe I'm telling you this." Eddie hides his face behind Richie's shoulder, his voice getting quieter and more uncertain as he continues, in one unbroken breath, _"Iusedtosmellit."_

"What the fuck," Richie says. "You sniffed my dirty laundry?"

"You make it sound way nastier than it was, I didn't like-- I didn't _do_ anything to it, I just… It smelled. Good. Is all."

"You _liked_ how I smelled?" Richie is trying to wrap his head around this perfectly baffling confession. "All you ever did was complain about what a nastyass I was. I would've thought you wanted me to smell like rosewater and fabric softener."

"No, you dick, I didn't want that, you smelled really fucking good. Like, sure, sweaty boy smell, but, in a good way that wasn't really like a locker room but more like, just… I don't know. Hugging you," he says, practically whispering. "Or spending the night at your house. Good smells. Good memories. The stuff I wanted to remember."

Richie feels a little bit like he's going to cry, which is completely unacceptable. It's been at least five years since he cried while masturbating.

"And then, you know, all of us just… forgot everything. Forgot each other. But I'm pretty sure I kept the shirt for years. I think Myra might've donated it to Goodwill or something."

"Subconsciously knew I had you dickmatized," Richie said. "Had to remove the competition."

"You're not wrong," Eddie says, unexpectedly. "I mean, I don't know. You weren't wrong before. About me. Marrying my mother." Eddie grunts. "I'm not gonna talk about this while your penis is right there."

"Yeah, my penis and I will thank you," Richie says. He wishes he could pull Eddie in to ruffle his hair, like he used to.

"I suck at this. Like, really suck."

"Eddie my love, believe me, you're doing just fine. Look at me, okay?" Eddie peeks up from behind Richie's shoulder, meeting his eyes again. "You are fulfilling so many of my teenage fantasies right now, and a not-insignificant number of my adult ones."

"I can't even touch you," Eddie sighs. The lines in his forehead deepen.

"Yeah, that's not my favorite thing in the world. Like, if I could've, I would've blown you so fuckin' hard by now."

Eddie's eyes go round. "What?"

"I'm talking black hole levels of suction. I wanted to suck your dick the second I walked into that restaurant, but I'm pretty sure the guys would've objected to that. Not Ben, though, that guy's a total closet freak."

Eddie turns so red he's bordering on purple. "Jesus, dude, that's…"

"Yeah, I know, imagine how I felt. I forgot you fucking existed for twenty years, and then I see you again and it's like--" Richie makes a bugling noise, a little _doot-doo-doo-doooo!_ for his boner.

"I was just afraid you weren't going to like me," Eddie says, dazed. Richie huffs out a bitter-edged laugh.

"Are you fucking kidding me? I had a flashback to every gay crisis I'd ever had. I was afraid if I sat next to you, it'd be too obvious how gay I was. I had to get drunk to handle talking to you again."

"Me?"

"Yeah, dipshit, you. Your dork ass is my gold standard. I've been coming up with excuses to touch you for so long I could probably get a doctorate in plausible deniability. I've never wanted anything as bad as I want you."

"I… that's…" Eddie smears his hand across his face, as if he can wipe the flush away. "Man, you really are gay."

Richie laughs warmly, settling back into the mattress and giving his flagging erection a stroke, and all of the sudden Eddie's attention is one hundred percent back on him, on his body.

"Yeah, man. That's how it is. You and your fanny packs got me good, and now I'm your bitch."

It feels so good to talk about it, for the first time in his life. He'd expected it to be so excruciating. It was like that first time they jumped from the ledge at the quarry-- fear, rising hot like bile, and a startling impact, followed by the cool weightlessness of water, murky but welcoming. This is uncharted territory, this thing between him and Eddie, but it's comfortingly familiar too. Some distant part of him thinks he ought to be embarrassed about what he's doing. He doesn't know when that part of himself got pushed so far away. It was the face he wore for most of his life, but he doesn't miss it. He likes this version of himself a lot more.

Eddie isn't really, technically speaking, breathing-- he knows this. But it looks like he is, his chest rising and falling, his mouth fallen open as he watches Richie's hand work over himself. He realizes Eddie's breathing to match Richie, his gasps and his sighs and his pleased humming. Eddie looks like he wants to touch him. It's an unforgivable crime that he's not able to.

"Touch me, Kaspbrak," Richie says. His voice is low and rough, startling even to his own ears. Eddie looks like he's about to protest that he can't when Richie slides an exploratory hand up his abdomen and towards his chest. "Yeah, like that." Eddie seems to catch on, flushing with it. He can be Eddie's hands, if he has to. He'd be a lot more than that if he needed it.

"Yeah," Eddie says. "Okay." He makes a motion, like he's stroking the side of Richie's face. Richie follows with his own hand, cupping his cheek, sliding the pads of his fingers over his ear and his jawline. Eddie moves down Richie's neck, and Richie follows a moment behind him, like a one second delay in a video. Eddie traces down Richie's ribs, over his hip, and Richie can practically feel it, his hesitant hands growing in confidence, longing to reach out and through and _be_ there, be present, be _alive_. Eddie can't do much more than that, his hands passing through Richie's reflection in the mirror when he tries to draw closer, but Richie tries to grant him that too, fucking his hand faster, spreading his fingers over the tensing muscles in his belly. He lets out a desperate sound.

"Eddie," he groans.

"Richie," Eddie responds. He's been staring at the path Richie's hands have made for him, but he's forced to look back up to lock eyes with Richie again. Richie feels it like a full-body caress, hot and heady and throwing off his rhythm. Tears prick at the corners of his eyes. "Are you gonna come?"

"Yeah, I-- fuck. Yeah. Make me come."

"I want you to," Eddie says. He looks at Richie so intensely he almost comes right that second. "I wanna-- I wanna watch you do it."

"Please," Richie says.

"Yeah. Come on, Richie, I want you to come. I wish I could--"

"Fuck, Eddie, fuck me," Richie breathes, and then he comes, over his fist and in long streaks up his stomach, making sounds he'd be laughing at if he weren't absolutely out of his mind with how fucking good it feels. He does laugh, just a little bit, a helpless smiling cough of relief. He keeps pumping listlessly until he's wrung out and exhausted and feels so intensely it almost hurts, and he has to let go.

"Wow," Eddie says, breathlessly.

"Yeah," Richie says. He feels fuzzy around the edges now, and everything sounds sort of far away. Sometimes after he's jerked off he feels dirty, or bored, or lonely, but right now he just kind of feels like he's floating in a bowl of pleasantly warm pudding.

"That was-- I mean, you looked-- wow."

"And the crowd goes wild," Richie mumbles. He catches his breath for a bit, putting off the moment when he will inevitably remember his hand and stomach are covered in drying semen that he really ought to wash off. "Enough of a show for you, Eds?"

Eddie lets out a nervous little laugh. "Yeah, uh. Liked that one a lot better than your last one."

"Think I should make that part of my act?"

"I mean, isn't that sort of what you were already doing?"

"You calling me a jerkoff, Eddie?" Richie straightens his glasses, flipping Eddie the bird. "If you don't watch it, I'm gonna smear jizz all over all the mirrors. You'd have to look at everything through a fine sheen of spunk."

Eddie snorts. "It's sort of like that already, so if you want to have to see yourself through a cumshot darkly, be my guest."

Richie's hand spreads out in the puddle of come on his stomach. It's a little bit gross, but also weirdly satisfying. "The fuck does that mean?"

"Please go wash off," Eddie says, grimacing. The spell is broken, and Richie's dick has turned back into a jizz-coated pumpkin. Richie wiggles his sticky fingers at Eddie, making him recoil. "Guh!"

"You love it. I saw you looking at me like I was a fanny pack full of wet wipes earlier." But he rolls out of bed all the same, careful not to drip on the floor as he makes his way into the bathroom to wash his hands and wipe himself down with a damp towel.

He looks at himself-- not just at Eddie looking at him, but himself. He's been so focused elsewhere, he hasn't really taken the time. He looks… healthier, somehow. There's color in his cheeks. He looks better rested than he has in years. Is it the afterglow, or something more complicated? It's so strange to look at himself and see someone he's sort of proud of, rather than someone he's resigned to. He's so caught up in his own transformation, he forgets to ask Eddie what he meant before.

Richie puts on clothes, something sort of nice that's actually clean, and takes Eddie out to breakfast.

\---

They've had what Richie refers to as _supernatural FaceTime sex_ a few times when Richie finally asks Eddie, "Hey, what does it feel like for you?" Richie's in the shower, washing away the evidence. Eddie's eyebrows do that cute little thing they do when he's thinking too hard about something.

"It's-- I don't know how to describe it to you." Richie shuts the water off, stepping out and wiping the fog from the mirror before he towels down so that he can see Eddie while they talk. "It's not like… I mean, I only sort of remember what things felt like before I died. What having a body felt like."

"Seriously?" The room is hot and full of steam, but Richie feels a chill run goosebumps up his arms. "You fucking forgot what feelings are?"

"No, not like that, just… Subconscious shit sorta starts to fade. Like, you know how when you're not hungry you forget to eat? I forget what being hungry feels like. But I also forget what it feels like to need to breathe, or blink, or pump blood, or have my heart beat. Like, how the room is full of steam right now, and your glasses fog up and everything gets kind of hazy… that's what _everything _feels like. Until I watch you, and then I can sort of remember."

"What the fuck," Richie says. He's frozen where he stands in the bathroom, towel clutched to his waist.

"Yeah, I don't know. It's weird." Eddie has an unhappy frown, looking up and down at Richie as he drips onto the bathmat. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to make you worry about it. I mean, it's fine."

"It's… Dude, that's really not fine. That sounds sort of awful."

"It's not that bad, really," Eddie says. Richie leaves the bathroom to retrieve his glasses from his dresser, setting the mirror he's slept with for the last few nights upright against the wall. "When we… when I watch you… I can feel more. It's like it comes back to me. I'm almost alive again, for a few minutes."

"Almost," Richie says. His eyes are round and wide as he studies Eddie's face in the mirror. "Is that why you're here? To feel alive?"

"How many times do I have to tell you, I don't know," Eddie says impatiently.

"I don't know, we never fucking talk about it. I keep trying to understand, but I… I mean, I'm glad you're here. Of course I'm glad you're here, but I'm starting to feel like you're a-- a frog I'm keeping in a mayonnaise jar or something."

"A fr-- what the fuck?".

Richie winces. "Like, a really sexy frog?"

"I'm not a fucking frog! And it's not like being in a jar, it's more like... Feeling everything through plastic wrap. Like fifty layers of plastic wrap, but sometimes only. A couple of layers. Of plastic wrap."

"Yes, thanks, that definitely makes me feel better about it, Laura Palmer."

"Oh, for fuckssakes, Rich, what do you want from me?"

"I want you to tell the truth, man," Richie says. "Are you happy here?"

Eddie opens his mouth, then closes it.

The phone rings.

"Fuck," Richie says, then stalks over to the side table to look at the caller ID.

**BEVERLY MARSH**

"_Fuck_," Richie says, with great feeling. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck." _He hits accept. "Hey, Bev, how the fuck are you?" He winces at the manic edge to his voice.

"Richie," comes Bev's voice, gentle and uncharacteristically hesitant. "Hey. I, um. Sorry for not calling sooner."

"Hey, no, don't worry about it," Richie says, feeling like the world's worst scumbag. He's the one who's been avoiding her, not the other way around. "It's great to hear from you." He glances nervously between the floor and Eddie staring at him from the mirror, an unhappy frown carved into his features. He hesitates, with sweating palms, before deciding to turn on speakerphone. "So, uh, what's up?" he says.

"...Richie, I…" Bev starts, and Richie starts to sweat even more. It really isn't like Bev, to be so nervous. "I don't know..." He hears her sigh into the receiver. He was already on edge, but now he feels like he's been dunked in a bucket of ice water, because he knows the sound of her fear.

"Is it happening again?"

"I'm not sure," she says. "I… I'm really just not sure. I don't know if it's… _It_, if It didn't really die, or if… if I'm just going--"

"--going crazy?" Richie says at the same time. He has an awful, leaden feeling in his gut.

"I just don't know. I called Mike first, and he's in full catastrophe mode. You know."

"Yeah," Richie says. His mind is a whirlwind of noise, thoughts and feelings and fears glomming together and sticking in his throat.

"He and Bill are on their way up here… I'm, I'm here with Ben, at his place in New York right now, but I don't know if Mike will think… maybe we have to go back to Derry, but--"

"Bev, hey," Richie finally manages to say. He pinches the bridge of his nose behind his glasses, screwing his eyes shut and trying to focus. "What's actually happening? What are--" He swallows. "What did you see?"

"It's Stanley," Bev says. She sounds on verge of tears. "He's here."

\---

Twenty four hours later, Richie is on standby for a flight bound for Albany after a connecting flight to Charlotte. He slept for maybe an hour or two on the plane, in snatches, and he feels like the shit on the edge of one of those scrapers they use to clear food and grease off the griddle at the end of a shift at the Waffle House.

Eddie has been vacillating between eerie calm and frantic questioning for the duration.

"You didn't tell her," Eddie says. "You could've told her about me, why didn't you?"

"I don't fucking know," Richie mutters, ostensibly into the mic of his headphones. A woman traveling with two young boys, both too occupied by their phones to notice him, glares hatefully in his direction.

"She thinks she's going nuts, man!" Richie is facing the window, a solid pane of glass through which he can see the tarmac, and onto which Eddie's life-size image is projected. He's pacing back and forth in front of a row of seats. "You could have told her she's not fucking nuts!"

"We'll be there in like, three or four hours, and then it… I mean, you'll be there. She'll see you. It'll be easier to explain if she can see you. I'm not gonna just come out and be like, 'Well hey, now that you mention it, Eddie's ghost is here, too, what a coincidence!'"

"And why the fuck not?"

"Because I'm new at this telling the truth thing, it's fucking hard, Jesus! I didn't tell anyone for like, a really long time, it's weird to tell them now." Richie feels even worse, having said it out loud. It makes him sound so pathetic and selfish. "I… fuck, dude, I'm sorry, I should have said something. What the fuck is wrong with me."

"I…" Eddie slumps, appearing to lean against the window from the floor. "I mean, I could have told you to call them, but I didn't. I think… I mean, I did want to. To stay. I did."

"Please don't lie just to make me feel like less of an asshole, that will just make me even more certain that I am the biggest gaping asshole in the world."

"I wanted to," Eddie says, shaking his head. "I wanted to."

There are bigger questions they're talking around.

A day or two after Richie had returned to LA, twenty-seven years of memories heavier, he had been compelled to google Stan's name. The obituary had been the first result, two paragraphs to summarize the life of a friend whose absence left a hole in Richie's life that couldn't have been spanned by twenty, or a hundred, or one thousand paragraphs. He hadn't seen Stan since they were eighteen years old, that was true enough, but what they'd experienced together made them alike on a molecular level, by Richie's estimation. They'd all been through the same meat grinder and came out as parts of each other.

The obituary left out any details-- no cause of death, no pleas for like-minded people to seek help, no donations made to mental health organizations. There was no reference to Derry, either. Richie imagined that Stan's wife hadn't known about his childhood, given that all of them had forgotten it, too. _Stanley Uris was an avid birder who loved traveling and spending time with his family. Survived by father Donald Uris and mother Andrea Uris (née Bertoly), and his loving wife, Patricia Uris (née Blum)._ Like the rest of them, no children.

What was there was a photo. _Stanley Uris, 40 years old, 1976-2016_. None of them had ever seen him as an adult. The monster had taken his face, but it had been his face as they remembered it, eternally thirteen. In the photo, Stan was smiling, crows feet gently creasing, a set of binoculars around his neck, surrounded by green, with the same tumble of brown curls he'd had in his youth. He was the same friend Richie had loved so much, and he was a complete stranger.

What would he say to him? What could he _possibly_ say?

Richie tilts his head back to drink from his bottle of water. A rivulet escapes his mouth and runs down the front of his shirt. He sputters, cursing.

He writes notes to Eddie in the margins of an airport-purchased sudoku book during the hour and a half they're in the air.

"It's… I mean, it's really Stan, isn't it? What if it isn't?" Eddie says. Richie is shoved in next to an older man whose elbows seem to want to take up the seats on either side of his body; he's long since given up his armrest as a lost cause, but he did manage to swing a window seat, so he presses himself inward and curls in toward it and Eddie's reflection.

**I believed you,** Richie scribbles. **I think it's him.**

"Why is he… why would he come back? Why do you think he would come back?"

**Why did you?**

Eddie sputters. "I didn't choose this, but I also didn't wanna fucking die, did I?"

**Maybe Stan didn't either.**

Richie stares down at what he just wrote. He stares, and stares, until he's looking past the words, into the paper, the brown grains of it, the cheap texture, the glop of the ink from his pen digging trenches into it. Compelled, he scribbles the words out until they are a glossy void.

\---

The drive from the airport to Ben's place is unsettlingly quiet.

The rental car has GPS, and Richie is too nervous to turn on the radio, so he drives in silence punctuated only by the occasional outburst from Eddie in the rear-view mirror or the tinny voice of the navigation system commanding him to _take a sharp right onto Osborne Road_. He grips the wheel tightly, his shoulders tense, and drives as if in a hypnotic state. It reminds him so strongly of the trip back to Derry he almost feels nauseous.

He has to reassure himself: there's no danger. There's no monster. The only thing waiting for him are his best friends in the world. And the prospect of confronting Stan. And the lifetime of lies Richie's been sitting on compounded by the month or two of lies-by-omission. No big deal.

"I wanna barf," he says. The further he drives, the further from civilization they get, the more likely it is he's going to have to pull off the road to hop a guardrail and vomit into a bush. He'd much rather vomit in a nice, welcoming McDonald's bathroom. It's nicer than a gas station bathroom but makes him feel less like a documentary about aging 80s rockers than throwing up in an upscale restaurant does.

"Don't you dare," Eddie says. "I've seen enough of that shit."

"I mean it," Richie says. "I'm gonna fucking blow chunks."

"You cannot show up to this thing covered in vomit, dude, I forbid it. You have to be chill when you introduce me so they don't freak, I'm not gonna have you doing it with airline pretzels dribbling down your chin."

"It's so nice to know you care, Eds," Richie says, and hopes another sip of water will make his guts cut it the fuck out. He angles his elbows out so his shirt won't stick to his armpits.

"I… I'm pretty fucking scared, Rich," Eddie says. "I don't know what's gonna happen or, or what any of this means."

"I don't either. So I guess we can be clueless dipshits together." Oddly enough, the thought reassures him. In the end, it's just him and Eddie, and Bev, and Ben, and Mike, and Bill, and yeah, even Stan. Just like it's always been. Just like it should be.

He almost misses Ben's driveway. It's barely marked, and he has to brake and reverse a few feet when the GPS drones, _"You have arrived at your destination."_ It's nothing but trees back here, and he can't even see the house from the road. The driveway winds up and around, and then it appears, a great glass box of a house nestled into the side of a hill. Richie guesses you'd have to live in the woods if you replaced all of your walls with big panes of glass. The electric bills must be outrageous.

"Holy shit," Eddie mutters. Richie is inclined to agree.

As Richie's putting the car in park, Ben emerges from the front door, followed closely by a black and tan german shepherd, trotting along happily at his heel. He's barefoot, in a gray henley and a pair of weathered jeans that fit him entirely too well and probably cost something like four hundred dollars. Dude looks like the amalgam of every male model in the Sears catalog Richie definitely didn't regularly steal from his mom and shove between his mattress and the boxframe. He actually looks better than he had a few months ago, and Richie doesn't know how the fuck _that_ could be possible. Happiness looks good on him, he guesses. He actually looks a little bit softer, his face a little fuller, his abs a little less washboard, and that's a good look on him too. He looks more like himself and less like what he's trying to be.

"Hey, Richie!" Ben smiles, big and guileless. He's such a good-hearted ball of fluff, Richie can't even bring himself to be irritated that he looks like a bag of gym socks next to the guy. "Thank you for coming all this way. Was the trip okay?" He opens his arms for a hug, and Richie falls into it gratefully.

"Yeah, fine, you know, no problems. It's good to see you, man. You got even hotter, what the fuck."

Ben looks away bashfully, which only makes him even more endearing, the absolute fucker. He's let his beard grow out, and he's got this real cuddly country boy look going for him. He looks like how a Mountain Lodge Yankee Candle smells. Richie tells him so.

"Richie--" Ben laughs, covering his face. "You know, I never know if you're being serious or not."

"I've never told a joke in my fucking life, dude," Richie says. "So, uh. How's Bev?"

Ben's smile falls a little bit. "Pretty freaked out. We both are, really. She's inside with-- with Stanley."

Richie swallows. "Right now?"

"Yeah, he… he's around all the time. He only really seems to be able to follow her, for some reason, but we can both see him, clear as day. We're not sure why. Or if it's really… I don't know. It's not anything like before."

"So, what does he, like, appear in the mirrors?" Richie chuckles nervously.

"Yeah," Ben says, and gives Richie a strange look. "Yeah, mirrors. How did you--"

"Bev, hey, how are you!" Richie crows. Bev is in the doorway, tucked into a knee-length knit cardigan and holding her arm around her midsection, clutching a glass of wine in her other hand. Her eyes are as big and blue as ever, and she looks like she's gotten a little sun recently, because there's a stripe of freckles across her nose that are more apparent than they were a few months ago. She, too, looks even more beautiful than the last time they met. She had seemed thin and washed-out before, somehow diminished from the boisterous, vibrant girl she'd been. Some of that old color was back in her cheeks, even with this cloud hanging over her head.

"Richie," she says, and a smile breaks through the stormclouds. She gets up on her tiptoes to hug him, a quick but firm one-armed squeeze. "I'm so glad you're here." Richie gives her a kiss on the top of her head. Her hair has grown out a little, her thick curls touching her shoulders.

"Come on in," Ben says, and leads them into his home.

It's funny-- Richie would have thought of modern design as being cold and lifeless before today. Somehow, Ben's house gives the opposite impression. Everything is warm and open and perfectly suited to people existing inside it. Ben's good at what he does.

More pressing than Ben's sense of style, however, is the mirror on the wall directly across from the front door in the entryway, where Eddie clearly stands next to and just behind Richie. On the opposite end, there's Stan, right between Ben and Bev, taking the sight of the five of them in with sad eyes.

The sound of shattering startles him.

"Shit," Richie yelps. Ben holds still, broken glass and white wine spilling around his bare feet.

"Oh-- oh God, I'm sorry, I-- Oh God--" Bev rushes out to grab a towel, dragging the dog away from the danger by her collar. Ben stands completely still, allowing Bev to try to mop up the spill, corralling all the glass shards into her hands.

Richie glances down, but then he can't help but look back up, frozen in place in front of the mirror, staring at his friend's image. Stan looks at him intently, but when his eyes drift over to Eddie, they widen enormously. Eddie looks equally struck. It's as if the two of them actually exist in the same space, a step removed from where Richie and Ben and Bev stand. The only sounds are the clink of glass and Bev's muttered cursing.

Ben finally breaks the silence, looking equal parts heartbroken and hopeful. "Eddie?" Bev falters, dropping a shard of glass that clinks against the floor.

"Hiya, Ben," Eddie says, waving robotically. "Bev. Uh, Stanley. I, uh. Hi."

Before Richie can register what he's seeing, Stan has crossed the room, meeting Eddie and placing a hand on his shoulder.

A hand on Eddie's shoulder.

A hand that doesn't pass through, but rests there as if meeting flesh.

Eddie looks up at Stan, mouth fallen open, and touches his shoulder as well, patting it several times as if he can't believe he hasn't disappeared yet, and then he's going in for a hug, clutching Stan tightly, bunching his fists up in Stan's shirt, muffling his face in Stan's shoulder. Richie feels like someone has reached inside his chest and given his heart a bare-handed squeeze. He still can't speak. What he's watching is too far beyond his ability to cope.

Bev gives up on cleaning, and on crouching, and just sits down right where she is, holding her hands in front of her mouth. Ben is equally dumbstruck, but he eventually reaches down to touch her shoulder, offering her comfort.

Richie clears his throat as Eddie and Stan part, red-eyed and shaky. "Yeah, uh, hope you don't mind I brought Eddie along."

Ben and Bev both turn sharply to look at him. "Richie, you…" Bev says, questioning.

"Sorry, I should have… I should have told you sooner." Richie looks at his feet, his face burning. He feels like a little kid forced to explain himself to the teacher or something. "I've been seeing him-- he's been with me a while. And it is. Him. So." He looks back up to face Stan again, finally, taking him in. He looks a little different in person than he did in the photo Richie saw. He looks more like Stan. His Stan. It's comforting and agonizing at the same time.

Richie's gone over a hundred things he wants to say to Stan, running the full range from, _I'm sorry we weren't there for you,_ to _Hey, Stan the Man, what's crackalackin'? _to_ Fuck you, Stanley, fuck you for leaving us, how could you fucking leave us?_ He walks up to the mirror, pressing a hand to it, though he knows he can't reach through. Stan comes closer, taking a deep breath and looking to the floor before his head tilts back up and he faces Richie with tired eyes. Richie's hand balls into a fist, and what comes out of his mouth is simply, "I missed you so goddamn much."

Stan chews on his lip, his chin wobbling. He opens his mouth, taking a few breaths. "I'm sorry."

"Don't even start with that shit," Richie says. Eddie comes up behind Stan to throw an arm around his waist. Richie is so proud and happy he feels like shouting. "You fucking loser."

Between the three of them who remain corporeal, they get all the glass swept up and the wine mopped. Ben wanders into the (open-concept, beautiful) kitchen to funnel his nervous energy into pouring Richie a drink and putting together a cheese plate, like this is a normal adult party and not a gathering prompted by the existence of not one, but two ghosts.

Eddie and Stan seem reluctant to let go of each other, appearing to sit on one of Ben's long, luxurious white couches pressed up against each other in a way that would have been uncharacteristic when they were alive. Richie isn't at all jealous; he can't really begrudge them the contact. The friendly hugs earlier made him realize how starved he'd been for it, when all he'd been granted the last couple of months had been the suggestion, the fantasy of it. He couldn't imagine how difficult it was for the two of them, stuck in limbo. Eddie gives him a tight smile through the reflection in the plate glass windows and Richie feels guilty all over again.

"Okay," Bev says, taking a deep breath and letting her shoulders relax. She sits on the floor with the dog tucked under her arm, facing Stan and Eddie in the window. "So… You really _are_ Stanley, then."

"Yes," Stan says. "I'm still just… so sorry I scared you so badly. That wasn't… I never wanted to do that."

"You should've seen Richie when I showed up," Eddie says. He shifts so that he's sitting cross-legged, perching his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. It's such a juvenile pose, Richie can't help but be charmed. "I'm pretty sure I made him shit his pants."

"The only shat pants were yours when you saw what my condo looks like when there's no one around to bitch at me about cleaning it," Richie says.

"Oh, so that wasn't you screaming, 'FUCK YOU, YOU CLOWN-ASS MOTHERFUCKER,' like a little girl, that's good to know," Eddie says, and the others have a good laugh at Richie's expense. Even Stan has to hold back a little smile, and that eases Richie's spirit immensely. Eddie tactfully leaves out the part where Richie cried on the floor in his hallway in the small hours of the morning.

Bev rubs her eyes, the last of her giggles fading, before she rests her hand on the couch, as if to pat Stan on the knee, even though she can't really touch him. "I'm the one who's sorry, Stanley. You came to me and I didn't believe you."

"I mean, I don't think I would believe me either, for what it's worth," he says. "I… I'm kind of glad it was you, and not Patty-- not my wife." Stan swallows hard, sighing and looking at his hands in his lap. "I mean, who knows what she would have thought. At least you knew to call the others." He covers his face with his hand. Eddie throws an arm around his shoulder.

"I gotta ask… why _are_ you here?" Ben asks, walking in with a fresh glass of wine for Bev and some kind of green juice for himself that looks to Richie like liquefied grass clippings.

"I can tell you right now, Richie asked me that about a hundred times, and I never had any fucking clue," Eddie says. Stan nods, looking up from his hands.

"He's right, I don't really… It's not something I thought about, or decided. I don't really remember much of anything after… I mean it could have been ten minutes or forever. I can't really pin it down." He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, that's not much of an answer."

"It's okay," Bev says. "We just want to help however we can, if that means figuring this out, or finding a way to deal with it, whatever that means."

"Deal with it," Stan says. He stares at his fingers, and past them. "So… send me back."

"Maybe," Bev says, at the same time Ben says, "If that's what you want."

The room is quiet for a long moment, before Richie adds, "It's okay if you don't know what you want." He's standing by the kitchen island, holding onto the countertop in the hope that it'll keep him steady even though he kind of wants to hide in the bathroom. Stan looks at him, his eyes large, and he nods. Eddie gives Richie a grateful look, and that makes him feel a little better, too.

"How long have you been… around, Eds?" Bev asks, looking between him and Richie. Richie swallows, avoiding her eyes by cutting himself a slice of cheddar.

"Uh," Eddie says eloquently. "I guess it's probably been about a month?"

It's been six weeks, but Richie's not about to put himself on blast.

"A month?" Ben looks amazed. Okay, so maybe it wasn't a huge difference between a month and a month and a half.

"Forty-two days," Richie says, and covers the strain in his voice by downing half of his bourbon.

"Richie, what the hell," Bev says, and he winces. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I dunno, I didn't wanna bother you guys," he says, and it sounds even weaker now than it did a month and a half ago.

"Bother us? Richie, you could have been in real trouble! You can call us for anything, you should know that by now." Ben looks genuinely wounded, and that makes Richie feels sort of like he kicked a puppy or something. He's trying to come up with a response that isn't completely pathetic when he realizes Stan is staring at Eddie hard enough to burn holes in him.

"How?" Stan asks him, and that's when it finally hits Richie that Stan didn't know. Stan wasn't there. Richie finishes his bourbon and sinks down onto a barstool, covering his mouth.

"It-- we had to go fight It," Eddie says. "It got me." He points to the center of his chest, and Richie has to look away. He doesn't want to remember the dark stain spilling across Eddie's shirt, the blood pouring from his mouth, splattering hot across Richie's face. "Right here."

When Richie looks back, Stan is holding Eddie's hand and staring at their locked fingers. He's pursing his lips so tightly, Richie thinks he must be gritting his teeth hard enough to hurt, if he can even feel pain in that way anymore.

"I wanted to protect you," he chokes out.

_How were you gonna do that by dying,_ Richie wants to say. _You're not a fucking human sacrifice._ But before he can summon the nerve, there's a gentle bell sound from somewhere in the house.

"Oh, that'll be Mike and Bill coming up the drive," Ben says, pushing himself to his feet. He takes Bev's hand with him until she runs out of arm and releases him. Okay, so maybe Richie's a little bit jealous that everyone can hold hands but him.

"Well hey, let's go give them the confusing news," Richie says, moving to follow Ben to the door.

Mike and Bill arrive looking like they're going to star in a gritty reboot of _Ghostbusters_. Mike's arms are laden with books, and Bill has a duffle bag over his shoulder. They've both got five o'clock shadows and a haggard, unwashed look. They drove all the way from Louisiana, if Richie has the right of it-- they probably slept in the car and traded turns at the wheel, by the looks of them. Richie… probably owes every single one of his friends about fifty beers, at this point, for not talking to them sooner. He does notice that Bill's old bike is hitched to the back of the car, though, which is wild as hell. He's amazed the thing's held together this long.

"Woah, Mikey, why'd you bring the whole library with you?" Richie jokes.

"I thought it'd be best if we covered as many bases as possible, tactically," Mike says, adjusting the stack in his arms. "We made a couple of contacts, while we were in New Orleans, and one of them is sort of a historian-- unconventional areas of study, but definitely relevant to our situation--"

Ben looks at Richie pointedly, just as Bev is drifting out of the front door behind them. Richie's mouth goes dry.

"Okay, well, you see, that's the first thing I sorta need to talk to you about, Mike, my man--"

\---

"--Jesus Christ," Bill says, dropping the duffel bag in the doorway.

"I somehow doubt he's involved, but I won't rule anything out at this point," Richie says.

Bill rushes forward to reverently touch his fingertips to the mirror, leaving Mike standing stock-still in the doorway. Eddie and Stan approach Bill, appearing to stand behind either of his shoulders.

"Hey guys," Eddie says. Stan seems distracted, his eyes sliding back and forth between Bill and Mike apprehensively.

"It's really them," Richie says. "Like, at this point, if it isn't, I don't know what the fucking point is. I'm sorry I didn't tell you guys, it was… pretty fucking stupid of me, I can admit that."

"Yeah, Richie, that was pretty _fucking_ stupid," Bill mutters, but he is completely engrossed in staring at the ghosts standing behind him in the mirror. He keeps glancing behind himself, unable to reconcile their invisibility. He finally turns to fix Richie with a disapproving frown. "We can't afford secrets like this. Not anymore. Not ever again."

"I know, I know that," Richie says. Bill always had a way of guilting them into doing things for the greater good. "At first I thought I was just going crazy, and that I'd like, I don't know, wreck all your happy new lives with my fucked up brain."

Bev lets out a humorless, _"Ha,"_ but avoids their eyes when they turn to look at her.

"I figured out I wasn't going crazy after a while, but by then, I…" Richie looks at Eddie, who looks back at him nervously. Okay, maybe now's not the time to admit why he kept Eddie a secret. Maybe it'll never be the time. He's not sure what his obligation to disclose is when it's not just himself involved, and also one party is dead. Basic etiquette didn't really cover this particular circumstance. He wonders what Ask Abby would make of it. "I dunno." He looks to Bev again, who is staring at him with soft eyes that make him weirdly nervous.

"Stan," Mike says, setting his dusty stack of books down in the entryway. He approaches the mirror, standing next to Bill. "I can't touch you?"

Stan shakes his head, the slightest motion. Mike's face falls.

"I'm… I'm so sorry. I can't even begin to tell you how sorry I am."

"It's not your fault," Stan says, staring at the ground. "I made a decision. You couldn't have stopped that."

"Why the _fuck_, Stan, why would you think…" Bill stops himself, clenching a fist and looking away. He breathes slowly through his nose, in, then out. "I don't understand _why _you would think we'd be better off without you."

Richie has to clench his eyes tightly to keep them from tearing up.

"I… the letters--"

"Yeah, the letters," Bill says, agitated, and spins and walks away, pacing in the open entryway. "You said you would hold us back."

Stan purses his lips, looking at the ground. Richie can see tears welling in his eyes. "That's how it's always been."

"Bull_shit_," Richie says, and adrenaline surges through him, making his pulse roar in his ears. "You were one of the ballsiest motherfuckers I knew. I wouldn't have made it through that fucked up year without you."

Stan shakes his head dismissively. "I know you're trying to make me feel better--"

"You think I'm just blowing smoke up your ass? Fuck you, man, don't tell me what I think."

"He's telling the truth, Stan," Eddie says, elbowing Stan gently. "And the same goes for me. Like, I managed to work up the will to question my mother _once_. Literally one time, in pretty much my entire life. And that wasn't in front of a crowd of people, that was just me and her, and after I did that I went right back to doing whatever she wanted me to. And then I fucking married someone who'd do it to me all over again because I didn't know what else to do. That was my big brave moment."

"Don't sell yourself short, Eddie," Richie says, but Eddie silences him with a shake of his head.

"Never mind that, this isn't fucking about me," he says.

"It was never about which of us was the strongest or the bravest," Bev says, moving in closer. She pats Richie on the shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. "It was about all of us, together, holding each other up."

"Links in a chain," Ben says.

"We were _not_ better off without you," Bill says tearfully. "We're not _us _without you."

Stan breaks, tears falling from his eyes. He shrinks in on himself, curling his head between his shoulders.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

_"It. Is not. Your fucking. Fault."_ Eddie punches Stan in the shoulder with every word, then yanks him into another hug. Richie wishes he could do the same. Bev has the same thought, evidently, because she wraps her arms around Richie's waist, and Ben comes up behind her to pull them both into his arms. Richie supposes there are worse things in life than being double-spooned by his two of his favorite straights. Nearby, Mike has taken Bill's hand and pulled him in to rest his forehead against Mike's shoulder. Mike rubs circles against his back, but never looks away from the mirror. Richie reaches across to rest a hand on Mike's shoulder.

For a moment, it's almost like all of them are really there, whole, an unbroken chain.

\---

"It was hard to go back, after all that. I don't know. I mean, I f-forgot my little brother. How do you forget something like that? There was all this… s-stuff coming up for me that I hadn't had to think about in so long, and remembering all of you, and… me leaving like that, without really being able to explain it, I think Audra had just had enough." Bill accepts a glass of bourbon from Richie, who hands another glass to Mike. The two of them have pulled up barstools to the living area. Richie sits on the couch, tucked into the corner next to where Eddie and Stan appear to be sitting. "Not that I blame her. I don't know. Things hadn't been right for a while, I think I just wasn't able to understand why yet. But it was a mutual decision. As soon as the movie wrapped, so did we." Mike pats Bill on the back, and Bill gives him a tight smile. "How about you, Bev? I know things were kind of rough the last time we talked."

"Ha, yeah, um…" Bev is on Stan's other side, curled up against the opposite corner of the couch from Richie. Her feet are draped across Ben's lap, and he's holding her ankles loosely with one hand. "Well, I had to get a restraining order, so that was fun."

"God, are you okay?" Mike leans closer, resting his forearms on his legs.

"I think 'okay' is kind of a relative term right now," Bev says. She shudders out a sigh, and Ben strokes her foot a little with his thumb. "Our assets are all tied together, the business and everything. Even our lawyer was his guy, you know? But I got new representation, and… it's a work in progress. I just want it done. If I take a loss, so be it."

"He was sending threatening messages," Ben says darkly. "Blowing up her phone."

"I got a new phone, but I kept the old one. Evidence. Maybe it'll help," Bev says with a shrug, staring into her wine glass.

"I don't suppose we can kill _him_ by calling him a fucking clown," Richie says. What he'd like to do is kill the guy with a baseball bat, but that's probably slightly less defensible than his past murders. Oh god, he has a kill count.

"No, but I'd sincerely love to see you try," Bev says with a wry smile. "Ben's been a big help. Helping me get some of my things back, for one. Helping me find a new lawyer. But mostly it's been… really good, to have a place to stay where everything doesn't remind me of all that." She lifts her foot and taps his jaw with the tip of her toe, and he turns away with a shy smile. Richie's heart thuds at the sense memory it summons. He can almost smell the dirt of the clubhouse, and the musty hammock. "After I moved away, I forgot about… about everything, but it's like some part of me remembered and just… fell straight back into it, like I never left. I don't know what that says about me."

"I think I get it," Eddie says. Richie had been trying to avoid looking at him too obviously, but now he can't help it. The way they're sitting, it almost looks like Richie's arm is around his shoulder. "Mom sold the house so she could move closer to me when I left for school. After I graduated, I moved back in with her for… for a long time. And then she got sick, and there were hospitals, but Myra like… took over. She took care of _everything_. It was easy to fall back into it. When mom died, I didn't know what the fuck to do with myself, but with Myra around it was like practically nothing changed. And like, you know what a nightmare my mother was. Why would anyone want that? But it's like I didn't know who I was without her."

They all sit in silence for a moment, digesting. Richie's skin itches. Finally, he blurts out, "Anybody at this party got any goddamn weed?"

Mike snorts. Bill gives Richie a look like he cannot believe the shit that just came out of his mouth, which is deeply comforting in its familiarity.

"I cannot fucking believe you, dude," Eddie says. "I'm baring my heart over here and you just wanna toke up."

"Don't lie to me, you'd be doing the exact same fucking thing if you had lungs, amigo."

"I never did anything like that, asshole!"

"Never? Jesus, that explains it."

"Fuck you, man."

"Hey, if you watch me get high with your whole ghostly empathy thing, is that kind of like shotgunning, or...?"

Stan frowns. "Ghostly what?"

"You know, the thing-- like, when you watch people do stuff, you can feel it? Is that not a thing for you?"

"Beep beep, Richie," Eddie says.

"Watch people do _what,_ exactly," Mike says.

"I don't think that's a thing," Stan says.

"No, it's totally a thing. Eddie, back me up, you told me-- I mean--" Eddie is turning gradually pinker, and Richie can feel himself belatedly following suit as he loses confidence.

"We've got some weed," Bev says. Everyone in the room falls silent, turning to gape at her. If Richie were so inclined, he would marry her on the spot.

Ben nods sheepishly. "Not a lot, but…"

"Oh my God," Eddie says.

"If no one has any objections, I would like to partake of Benverly's weed," Richie proclaims, standing and addressing the room. "And you don't get to complain about secondhand smoke anymore, so shut it, Eds."

"I died in your arms, and this is the respect I get?"

"You're the Jack to my Rose, and I'll never let go, but this whole scene is a huge fucking bummer and we deserve to be intoxicated."

"I'm with Richie," Mike says. Bill raises an eyebrow at him, and Mike just narrows his eyes, like this is a conversation they've had before.

"All right, I'm in," Bill says, shaking his head.

"Stan, Eddie, you get veto rights," Bev says beatifically.

"You already know I think you're a bunch of fucking idiots, I dunno what else I can say," Eddie says, throwing his hands in the air.

"It's just like your inhaler, except it actually does something," Richie says, and Eddie gapes like a fish, his mouth opening and closing noiselessly. Bev snorts, covering her mouth. "Come _on_, Spaghetti Man, it'll be fun! Like the time we stole that thing of Baileys from my parents' liquor cabinet and went to see _Batman Returns._"

"You mean like the time _you_ stole that thing of Baileys from your parents, and _you_ drank it alone, and puked into a bucket of popcorn halfway through the movie, and I had to basically carry you home, and I never got to see the second half of _Batman Returns_? That time?"

"Yeah man, that was a fucking riot," Richie says. He really had remembered that as having been more of a mutual carrying-home. The night had been cool and Eddie had been warm pressed into his side. He'd very tenderly wiped Richie's face off with a damp napkin. Oh, yeah.

"Stanley, back me up," Eddie says. Stan looks between the two of them, entirely unimpressed.

"I shouldn't be surprised that the two of you have literally not grown up at all."

"Us? _Me?_ Save your scorn for Ms. Beverly over there, she's the one providing us impressionable youths with contraband substances."

"Remember all those pamphlets about peer pressure they used to pass out? They ought to put your face on the cover."

"Okay, mistake number one, I am not your _peer_, I am High King Trashmouth and you are my subjects."

Stan rolls his eyes. Richie's face hurts from smiling.

\---

"I actually think I feel a little bit lightheaded," Stan says. Stretched out on the couch, Richie lets out a listless, _"Ha!"_

"I told you, man," he says. There's a light fixture on the ceiling made of polished metal, and though distorted, he can see Eddie and Stan in the reflection. He's sort of passing through the two of them, but if he squints it's almost like he's draped across their laps. "I told you, ghostie--" He breaks off, giggling. "Ghostly empathy. Supernatural contact high." He glances into the kitchen, where Ben is messing with something on the stovetop.

"Whatcha doing in there, New Kid?" Bev says, raising her voice above the sound of his clattering. She curls her knees up to her chest and lays her head on the edge of the couch, her hair tumbling across it.

"It's getting late, I need to make _something_. You're my guests, I would be a terrible host if I just made you guys eat cheese and booze the whole time you were here."

"Ben, that sounds like an absolutely _spectacular _evening to me," Richie says.

"Please cook him something with a vegetable in it," Eddie says. "I've been watching him eat cheese and booze for dinner practically every night for weeks, I'm amazed he hasn't fucking collapsed yet."

"Aw, thanks for looking out, pookie," Richie says, his mouth curling into a smile.

"You're a goddamn nightmare," Eddie says.

"You want a glass of water?" Mike says quietly to Bill, pushing himself to his feet. The two of them have migrated to the floor as well, leaning against the other end of the long sectional. Bill snorts.

"You gonna slip me something again, Hanlon?"

"Oh, boy," Mike says, and walks toward the fridge, shaking his head.

"Excuse me, back it the fuck up," Richie says, swinging his legs over the side and returning to an upright position. His limbs seem to float pleasantly one after the other, in his perception. "I'm gonna need you to break that one down for me, Billy Boy."

"After you guys tried to bail on us in Derry, Mike like, dosed me. With a glass of water," Bill says, his head lolling against the couch. He waves his hand dismissively, like it's old news.

"You slipped Bill a _roofie?"_ Bev gapes at Mike, her jaw fallen open.

"It was not a roofie, it was a _root--"_ Mike says, carrying back two glasses of water for himself and Bill.

"Holy fucking shit," Richie says.

"What the fuck, Mike?" Eddie gesticulates, his hands fluttering in the windows.

"He was trying to get me to see the, the whatever. The Chüd. The ritual thing. It worked, I get why he did it. It's whatever."

"It's not 'whatever', it was… I was out of line," Mike says. Bill's eyes are closed; Mike rests the cold glass against his forehead to get his attention. Bill's hand gropes blindly and wraps around the glass, over Mike's fingers.

"We were all losing our shit," Bill says. "And you were the only one who'd been remembering It and fighting It the entire time we were gone. You were neck deep in it, of course you got desperate. I don't blame you." Richie watches them closely. He has the distinct impression that they've talked about this before. The two of them must have gotten really comfortable on their little deep south road trip. "I just want to know we're all on the same page from now on. No bullshit."

"Yeah," Mike says, and his mouth quirks up at the corner. He releases the glass and sits on the couch, his leg against the line of Bill's arm. 

This would probably be a good time for Richie to say what he needs to say. He thinks that quite fervently as he sits there in absolute silence. Something clatters loudly in the kitchen, and Richie uses that as an excuse to whistle to the dog, making her ears perk up. She trots over, happily accepting an ear scritch.

"Her name's Athena," Bev says, watching the two of them dreamily.

"Hi there, Athena," Richie coos. "Aren't you just the cutest?"

"This didn't go so hot last time," Eddie says nervously.

"Spaghetti Head doesn't understand," Richie says to the dog in his babiest baby voice. "You would never turn into a big werewolf-lookin'-ass monster dog, would you, Athena? Would you? No, you wouldn't! You're a good girl!"

"She is really sweet, isn't she?" Richie steals a look at Eddie, who is now admiring the dog cautiously. "Yes, you are. You're the sweetest puppy ever." Athena's head turns, and she tilts it to the side, staring at the empty space on the couch where Eddie appears to be sitting. She whines.

"Yo, dude, I think she can see you," Richie says, eyes round.

"What? No she can't."

"She can," Bev says, and whistles for the dog. Athena looks between her and the ostensibly empty couch, then trots over to her, ducking for a pet. "That was one of the things that was weird to us, about… when Stanley arrived."

Stan sighs, drawing his knee up to his chest. "I'm glad I didn't scare the dog, at least."

"That probably should have been a sign that it really was you," Bev says, looking guilty. "If she saw… anything else, she probably would have gone ballistic, you know? But she's a good judge of character. She knows a good person when she sees one, right girl?" She holds the dog's face in both of her hands, nuzzling her nose.

"Anyone object to penne and mushrooms?" Ben calls from the kitchen.

"I will eat whatever you put in front of me right now," Bill says.

_"Feed me, Seymour,"_ Richie says in his worst Audrey II impression. Eddie groans.

"References to any homicidal aliens, flora _or_ fauna, are banned," he says.

_"Feed me all night long,"_ Richie adds, going to his knees on the couch and clapping his hands together in prayer.

"I cannot physically shove a sock in his mouth, but I would consider it a personal favor if one of you did it for me."

_"'Cause if you feed me, Seymour, I can_ grfgk--" Richie is forced into silence, or at least muffled flailing, by Mike, who has crept behind the couch and clapped his hands over Richie's mouth. Richie struggles for a moment, then resorts to the oldest trick in the book-- he licks Mike's hand. Mike shouts, releasing him.

"Ha!" Richie flips him off, then Eddie and Stan, then the entire room. "Try and stop me, asshole! I--" He's cut off again by Mike pulling him into a chokehold and giving him an aggressive noogie. "Fuck! Bill-- Bev, help me, get this fucker off me!"

"Get him, girl," Bev says, and points; Athena leaps up, hopping onto Richie's lap and licking him relentlessly. Mike releases him, laughing uproariously.

"Fuck you, traitors," Richie sputters, wrestling the dog away. "You are _not_ a good girl! I rescind all statements related to your goodness, you Benedict Arnold piece of shit!"

"Are you verbally abusing Ben's dog?" Stan squints disapprovingly.

"I will verbally abuse every last one of you motherfuckers and all of your dogs!"

\---

It turns out that Ben is a good cook, even when he's sort of high and improvising with whatever is in his pantry. Maybe it's the weed, but Richie eats two servings, and he's pretty sure he could eat another two. Bev goes to do the dishes, but Richie intercepts her, telling her to go make out with Ben in his stead as a reward for his cooking skills. "Don't hold back on the tongue, I'm a real Sloppy Sally," he says, rinsing out bowls and loading them into the dishwasher.

With his back turned, Richie can only hear Bev's response. "Oh, Ben," she coos, and starts making obnoxious smacking noises while Ben wheezes.

"Wow, Richie, I didn't know you were such a great kisser," Ben says through coughs of laughter.

"That's your loss, pal. You're missing out on a gold star experience. Savor it while you can, because the slop shop's closing up after this. High demand, limited supply." Richie can see Eddie perched near the sink in the reflection on the faucet. Richie gives him a little wink. Technically speaking, he hasn't gotten to actually kiss Eddie, but if he could he thinks they'd have to get the fire department to forcibly remove his tongue from Eddie's mouth. Provided Eddie didn't have a weird thing about mouths. Which he probably did. Whatever: not relevant.

Eddie turns away, but his image is too distorted for Richie to read his expression.

"So, I've been curious, Richie-- what do your girlfriends think about your act?" Bill asks as Richie's closing the door to the dishwasher. Richie's stomach drops, the carefree daydream of the last couple of hours vanishing in a flash. "You said you didn't write your jokes, but all that made up stuff, do they like, not care about it or what?"

"My girlfriends," Richie says distantly, his eyes drifting across the room, avoiding his friends' eyes.

"Yeah, or whoever," Bill says. He falters, seeming to guess that he's misstepped. Richie's eyes land on the window. Stan is watching him with a frown, but when he catches Eddie's eyes, he looks just as panicked as Richie feels.

"Hey Ben, where's your bathroom, I gotta piss like a fucking racehorse," Richie rattles off, shoving his hands in his pockets to hide how they're shaking.

"Huh? Oh, it's-- down the hall, there's one just off the bedroom, it's the second door on the left--"

"Thanks man," he says, already jogging away. As soon as he's down the hall and in the door, he starts muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." The door closes behind him, and he makes for the sink, hunching over it with both hands gripping the countertop. He wants to throw up. He suppresses the urge, splashing his face with cold water.

"Richie--"

_"Fuck,"_ he yelps. Eddie is there, standing behind him, looking at him with concern etched into every line on his face. "Shit, I kind of forgot you had to come with me. Fuck. Shit dammit."

"Okay, fucking cool it, you're starting to make me freak out too--"

"Am I freaking out? Wow, I had no clue!" Richie buries his face in a towel and lets out a high-pitched groan of anxiety. "God damn it, now I _have_ to tell them, I ran outta there like someone spilled a drink on my quinceañera dress."

"Richie, fucking look at me," Eddie says. Richie's eyes snap up, locking with Eddie's. Eddie looks determined. Battle-ready. It's pretty hot. "Hey. Who killed a psychotic clown before he was fourteen?"

Richie inhales sharply. "Me," he says faintly.

"Who split Bowers' head in half with a hatchet when he went after Mike?"

"Okay, not helping the nausea situation here, with that--"

_"Who did it?"_

"Me, me, I did," Richie mutters.

"That's right. Who stayed with me until I died, even though it would've been safer to run?"

Richie feels his face screw up, and he grits his teeth to hold it back. He doesn't want to think about that. He can't. He shakes his head. Eddie doesn't understand. He doesn't understand that Richie would have stayed right there, with Eddie's corpse, refusing to hear reason, refusing to be moved, as the cavern collapsed around them. He doesn't understand that Richie would happily have died right there in that dank hole in the ground if it meant he didn't have to leave Eddie behind. Eddie wants to call it bravery, but it doesn't feel much like that from where Richie's standing.

"It's not what you think," he says weakly. "They had to drag me out. I wanted--" He drops his head between his shoulders. It's too much, too soon, too raw.

"Whatever it is, I know you. I know you're the guy who always stood up for me when it mattered, even when it would have been easier not to. And I know them too. And I know they love you."

Richie swallows hard, burying what he's not ready to face. He nods, rubbing at his eyes under his glasses. "Okay. Yeah." He takes a few deep, steadying breaths. "What do you want me to say about you?"

"Me?" Eddie blinks, frowning.

"Yeah, I mean. What's okay for me to say? I don't have to say anything." Eddie blinks rapidly, processing.

"Oh. I mean. You… you want to tell them?"

"I mean, not _everything_," Richie says. Eddie turns pink.

"No, of course not _everything_, you fucking jackass. I-- I don't know. I'm-- It's a lot."

"Yeah."

"It's new. I don't--"

"Yeah, no, I get it." Richie runs his hand back through his hair, trying to shrug it off. "I mean, that's your-- you get to decide if--"

"--I'm still trying to figure out--"

"--it's cool, I'm just gonna focus on the, the main thing. The thing. That thing. I just gotta go do it." Richie starts to pace, back and forth across the bathroom, which he thinks might actually be as large as his kitchen. "I'm gonna do it. I'm doing it. Okay. Fuck!" He opens the door and stalks back into the living area, where the rest of his friends are all in a sort of huddle, muttering to themselves. They perk up like meerkats upon his return, and it almost makes him burst out laughing.

Bill speaks up first. "Hey, Richie, are you--"

"I'm gay."

Bill goes through so many facial expressions so rapidly Richie honestly almost does lose his shit. Bill blinks with the manic energy of a hummingbird on speed flapping itself to death.

"Oh," he says. "That's-- oh."

Richie nods, pressing his lips together awkwardly. His eyes slide around the room, never daring to rest on one person for more than a minute. Mike looks a little bit like he wants to laugh at Bill, which, to be fair, so does Richie. Bev is smiling a little bit sadly, and Ben's eyes are wide and round. Eddie is watching everyone just as nervously as Richie is. Stan, on the other hand, seems to have had no reaction at all, which almost makes him more nervous than Bill's floundering.

"I'm-- okay, I'm a little surprised, but--"

"Really?" Bev says, then covers her mouth at having let it slip out.

"What do you mean, 'really'," Richie says, giving her an offended look. "You knew?"

"I had an idea," she says with a wince. "I didn't know for sure. Sorry."

"Wait, how?" Bill asks. "I mean-- no offense, Richie--"

"None taken, I worked pretty fucking hard to make sure nobody figured it out."

"I told you, I wasn't sure, it was just… little things. A vibe I got. It's hard to explain."

"I have _gay vibes?" _

"Only if you want to have gay vibes," Bev says diplomatically. Richie snorts. "Girls have to figure out which guys are a threat. Not that any of you were ever threatening! But you can tell when someone's looking at you like-- And you were never like that, no matter how many jokes you made. So, I didn't know for sure, but I had an idea." She shrugs.

"I knew," Stan says. The others turn to face his reflection in the window. Richie gapes openly.

"What the fuck, man, how did _you _know?"

Stan looks like he would rather be anywhere but in this room explaining himself in this moment. "I found your stash."

"My _what--_ what stash, I don't--"

"It was sticking out of your mattress."

Richie blanches. "I could've been looking at the women."

"You weren't," says Stan.

"Yeah, you're right, I wasn't," Richie says, tossing his head back and covering his face in defeat.

"Did everyone know about this but me?" Bill looks mildly offended. Richie wants to dunk his head in a toilet just a little bit.

"I didn't know," says Ben, who still looks a little awestruck.

"I, too, did not know for sure," Mike says. "But I'm really glad you told us." He smiles. "Also, so am I."

_"What?"_ Bill and Richie both snap, staring openly at Mike. Bev's eyes widen into two perfect circles, and she purses her lips to hold back a smile, her eyebrows somewhere in the vicinity of her hairline.

"Okay, how the fuck did I not know this," Richie says. Now he's the one who's kind of offended.

"I was a black farmboy in rural Maine, I played it pretty close to the chest," Mike says, amused.

"My gaydar fucking sucks, man." Richie walks past the crowd of them and throws himself onto the couch with a dramatic _thump_. "Next you're gonna tell me Ben's a lesbian."

"I-- uh?" Ben, ruddy-cheeked, looks stunned.

"I spent all this time trying to throw you fuckers off my scent for no goddamn reason!"

"Hey, I get it," Mike says, sitting next to him on the couch, leaving Bill standing alone, still looking like he's bluescreened. "I definitely get it. It wasn't safe to be different in Derry."

"I'm so sorry," Bev says, sitting on the floor in front of the two of them. She rests her arm across Richie's lap and lays her head on it, looking up at him. "I totally stepped on your big moment, that was an asshole move. I'm really, really glad you finally said something." Mike ruffles her hair, and she crinkles her nose, laughing. "Yeah, you too."

Behind her, Eddie clears his throat. They turn to look at him, reflected in the glass, standing in the middle of the living room.

"I, uh. I think, I maybe, also-- Uh. Fuck."

Bill sits down, dazed.

"You don't have to, Eddie," Richie says quietly.

"No, I really do. But I think I just figured it out like, two fucking seconds ago, though."

"Oh, Eds," Bev says, covering her mouth with her hand.

"That's-- that's probably kind of pathetic, right? I'm forty fucking years old. Also I'm dead."

"You're really just figuring it out now?" Mike leans in with a concerned frown.

"I don't know, I think I just tried not to think about it. I think I tried not to think about it so hard that I forgot?"

"You _forgot?"_ Ben doesn't seem doubtful so much as bewildered.

"I think I just thought, well, I'm-- I mean, I'm not-- that can't be me. That's someone else. That has nothing to do with me. And then we all forgot each other, and I didn't have a reason to think about it at all anymore." Eddie looks absolutely wretched. Richie doesn't know if Eddie would want anyone to touch him right then, but he wants to. He wants to so much he aches. His hands feel empty. He squeezes them into two tight fists.

Bev looks up at Richie with sad, knowing eyes, and that just makes it worse.

"I'm not sure I understand," Bill says. Eddie curls in, hugging himself.

"I didn't fucking get it until I saw you guys again, and Richie was there, and I-- and even then, I was just like, _hurr, the fuck does this mean,_ until he almost fucking died, and, and I-- and then _I_ was dead and it was too late, and--"

Richie's fingers dig into his palms. He watches Stanley approach Eddie, laying a firm but gentle hand on his shoulder, squeezing. Richie is simultaneously grateful and powerfully jealous.

"Jesus," Bill mutters. Next to Richie, Bev and Mike are looking at Eddie like they're heartbroken, their eyes wide and glistening. Ben glances between Richie and Eddie, puzzling.

"--but I, uh, I guess I get it now. Good for me. Gold star. Fuck."

"There's no time limit on figuring this stuff out," Mike says.

"There kinda is when you're fucking dead," Eddie snaps. Richie closes his eyes, cringing. "Guy tells you he's been in love with you practically your entire life, and you can't even touch him? It's a fucking nightmare."

Bev's eyes squeeze shut. She grips Richie's knee. Richie stares at the point of contact, not wanting to see anyone staring at him. Yeah, he's perfectly aware of what a weird, fucked up, monkey's-paw-ass situation he's in right now.

"Oh," Bill says, practically a sigh. "That-- okay, that… m-makes a lot of sense, now, actually."

"Glad the facts add up for you, Sherlock," Richie says. "I would've gotten around to that part, but these chucklefucks interrupted me with their '_I am Spartacus'_ routine." Richie offers Eddie a brittle smile. He just looks so lost. "Like seriously, what the fuck. I feel pretty fucking stupid right now. I just wanna know one thing, though." He looks up at Stan, who's still steadily holding Eddie by the shoulder. "Stanley, you gotta level with me. Are you still my straight man?"

Stan blinks once, twice, and then he breaks-- he laughs. Quietly at first, a little huff of breath, and then harder, and bigger, until he's laughing as loudly as Richie's ever heard. "Yeah, Richie," he says breathlessly. "I'll always be your straight man." And then tears spill over his cheeks, and his mouth turns down at the corners, and just as quickly, the laughter turns to hiccuping sobs. Stan sags, and Eddie is there to hold him up, sliding an arm under his and around his back. Stan sinks to the floor, and Eddie goes down with him, laying a head on his shoulder.

Bev inches over, sitting near where they would be, if they could be seen. Ben follows her lead, sitting down beside them. Mike slips down off the couch, and then Bill, until they're forming a little half-circle around their only provisionally visible friends.

Richie goes last, choking back a wave of emotions. It's torturous, not being able to touch either of them. If his friends weren't here, he doesn't know how he would deal. Scream, maybe. Punch something inadvisable. Get blind drunk. Actually, he still kind of wants to do that. But instead, he sits down next to Bill, who throws his arm over Richie's shoulder and pulls him in for a little hug that he is so desperately grateful for he could cry.

"Jesus fucking Christ, guys, this is exhausting," Richie says after a few minutes of hugging it out. Stan has calmed down, and he and Eddie both look wrung out. "I dunno about you fuckers, but I need a drink and a nap. No more emotional sincerity tonight, I'm tapped the fuck out."

"I'm sorry," Stan says, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I think maybe it's my fault."

"It's your fault your dumbshit friends have been hiding an entire goddamn pride parade up their asses for thirty years?"

"No, not that," Stan says. "I think maybe it's my fault that we're here at all."

"You mean you and me," Eddie says. Stan looks at him and nods weakly.

"I've been wondering about that," says Mike. "I had a theory. 'Cause you're linked to Bev, somehow, right? And Eddie's linked to Richie."

"I just figured it was the unstoppable power of our love enduring beyond death," Richie says.

"Shut the fuck _up_, oh my god," Eddie says, covering his head with his hands.

"I do love you, Stanley, but I don't think that's the reason you came here," Bev says. Stan huffs out a laugh.

"No, see," Mike says, "I think it must be the Deadlights. Bev and Richie both looked into them, right? So maybe--"

"You think that's why they came to us? Like, we could be some kinda supernatural phoneline?" Richie is unsettled. He hasn't noticed any other side effects, but the idea that he could be some kind of satellite dish for other spooky bullshit is not a reassuring one.

"It's dead," Bev says, her eyes hollow. "I don't think it'll work the same way it did before, now that It's dead. Like the nightmares I used to have…"

"Nightmares?" Stan frowns. Bev looks up, grim and pale.

"After… after It took me, I had visions. All the time. Almost every night. How you died. How all of us would die."

Stan looks stricken. "I didn't know."

"That was what It wanted. If we didn't go back to either kill It or let It take us… One by one, we'd…" Bev breaks off, shaking her head to exorcise the memory. "But I haven't been dreaming the same way since. There are still nightmares sometimes, but… just normal ones, I think."

"Like that one where I have to go back to finish high school cause I never graduated," Richie says, "But then like, I can't find my pants anywhere, so I have to go in a towel, and then they make me take the SAT in front of the whole auditorium while I'm trying to hold the towel up-- you don't think that could be because of the Deadlights, do you?"

Eddie squints at him. "Do you listen to yourself talk, dick-for-brains?"

"I told you fuckers no more sincerity! Ben, do you have any beer? This is a problem for beer."

"I only have wine and liquor," Ben says apologetically.

"This is a problem for liquor!"

Mike wanders over while Richie's helping himself to Ben's liquor cabinet, and Richie pours a glass of bourbon for him as well without asking. If he doesn't want it, surely _someone_ will, or else Richie'll just dual-wield it.

"Hey," Mike says quietly, leaning against the cabinet. "Are you okay?"

Richie nods vigorously, never stopping, even while he downs half his drink. Some dribbles down his chin.

"Uh huh," Mike says knowingly. "Okay, putting the kibosh on the sincerity. But I know that was… a lot, what you just did, and if you want to talk about it…" He takes the drink, raising it in a little toast.

"I want to talk about literally anything in the entire fucking world other than that. Hey, Bill!" Richie holds the bottle aloft, wiggling it at Bill as a question. Bill nods, and Richie pulls out another glass for him. "Tell us about what you guys were doing down on the bayou."

Bill launches into a ramble about his next book, which is still in its infancy-- at first he was thinking about a resurrection story, and wanted to look into zombie legends, but now he's looking at it from more of a rebirth angle. They've spent a lot more time talking to people than Bill usually does when he's researching a story, thanks to Mike, who has a weird knack for meeting the strangest, most off-the-beaten-path folks and getting amazing stories out of them. Bill says he's half tempted to just hire a few of them and edit the resulting anthology.

Ben says he needs to let the dog outside for a bit, so they decide to move the party outside too. It's October, and the air is crisp. Bev wraps herself up tighter in her sweater, and Richie shoves his hands in his pockets, shivering a little but kind of enjoying it. It rarely gets this cold in LA, and the leaves changing colors around him tickles some kind of primal nostalgia response in his hindbrain. He's not in Maine, and honestly, thank God, but he's back north, with his oldest friends. It's kind of homey. Athena dashes off into the underbrush when released, leaping and nipping at piles of leaves.

"Is that a pool?" Richie turns at the sound of Eddie's voice, and sees what he's pointing out-- it's covered, but it does in fact look like a fucking pool.

"Oh, yeah," Ben says. "It's heated, actually, if anyone wants me to open it up."

"No fucking way," Richie says.

"Didn't think to bring my swim trunks," Bill says.

"That never stopped us before," Mike says, laughing.

"It's kinda nice, even to just dip your feet in," Bev says. She wiggles her eyebrows at Ben, who smiles back at her like the lovestruck little kid he still obviously is. He gets Richie's help to take off the cover and roll it up, and sure enough, steam is rising off the surface of the water like a king-size hot tub. Ben's electric bills are _absolutely_ insane.

"Actually, Ben, if you don't mind," Bill says, "do you think I could use your shower? Been living out of a car for a few days, I feel kinda gross."

"Oh, yeah, of course," Ben says. "Help yourself to anything in there, and there should be clean towels in the closet."

"Awesome, thank you," he says, and slips back inside.

"Well, now that he's gone," Bev says, and drops her sweater to the ground, unbuttoning her blouse.

"Oh, damn, okay," Richie says, his eyebrows shooting up. "I cannot fucking let you have bigger balls than me again, this cannot happen. On this matter, at least, I still have my fucking pride." He tugs off his shirt and starts to unbutton his jeans.

"You two are nuts," Mike says, then starts to undress as well.

"I-- I'm still here," Stan says weakly.

"Consider it a freebie," Bev says, and jumps into the water in just her bra and underwear, feet first.

"_Fuck_, it's cold," Richie says when he's down to his boxers, glasses folded on top of his clothes, then he takes a running jump into the water, hitting the surface hard and plunging in. It's bizarre, doing a cannonball into what feels like a giant bathtub. It also feels fucking amazing. When he breaks the surface again, Mike is in the pool as well, smiling and laughing as Bev flicks water in his face with her fingers.

Richie looks down at his fuzzy reflection in the water, sees Eddie, and promptly loses his entire shit.

"What," Eddie barks. "What's so fucking funny?"

"You--" Richie wheezes, struggling to breathe. "You're still--"

Bev and Mike stop what they're doing to look. Bev covers her mouth to smother a snort. Eddie, and Stan as well, give every appearance of being in the pool with them. Their respective images are also both still fully clothed and completely dry.

"What in the hell," Bev says through giggles. Mike is shaking his head at the absurdity while Richie continues his hysterics.

"That is so fucking weird," Ben says, still clothed and standing on the edge of the pool, peering down into the water.

"What are you still doing up there?" Bev swims over to Ben and splashes a little at his feet.

"I gotta get the dog back inside," he says.

"Get your butt in here, ASAP."

"Give me a minute," he says, and whistles for Athena, who comes tearing out of the woods with leaves in her fur and a broad, toothy dog grin. He corrals her into the house, and then steps inside himself.

"Please don't go, girl," Bev calls, pouting comically. Ben glances back at her, holding back a giggle, before he closes the glass door behind himself. When he re-emerges, music has started to play from some outdoor speakers Richie hadn't known were there, the unmistakable synthesized tones of an eighties pop song.

"You did _not_," says Richie.

"Holy shit, I haven't heard this in years," says Eddie.

"I sort of wish I wasn't hearing this now," says Stan.

_"Please don't go, girl. It would ruin my whole world,"_ sings Joey McIntyre.

Mike lifts his hands from the water to slow clap.

"Where is that coming from," says Richie, paddling over to where Ben is rolling up the legs of his pants. "Do you have a playlist? King Trashmouth demands to see the playlist."

"Uh, I mean, sure," Ben says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He fiddles around with it for a moment. "I just put New Kids on shuffle but if you want--"

"Gimme," Richie says, and climbs up out of the pool, wiping his wet hands off on Ben's shirt.

"Hey!"

"Yoink." Richie plucks the phone out of Ben's hands. Ben fumbles for a moment, blinking in confusion, then relents, shaking his head and sitting down on the edge of the pool while Richie does whatever dark deeds he wants to with his phone. Richie fucks with it for a few minutes, shivering as the water clinging to him cools in the chilly afternoon air, then finally calls it done and returns the phone to its baffled owner. He hops back into the water gratefully, rubbing warmth back into his extremities.

"You're just gonna put your feet in?" Bev flicks a little water at Ben's face, and he flinches away, laughing.

"Yeah, I dunno."

"Ben, buddy, don't take this the wrong way, my heart belongs to another, but if I looked like you, I would walk literally everywhere fully nude all the goddamn time, laws be damned." Richie gestures towards him, looking askance at Eddie for his approval. Eddie glances between the two of them and then nods in agreement, like, _Yeah, what can you do._

Ben's ears turn an endearing shade of pink. "Oh, come on."

"Fuck the police, Ben!" Richie says. "Take it off!"

Ben looks down at Bev, who gives him a coy smile and an inviting shrug. Ben sighs, then lifts himself from the water, setting his phone a good distance away and beginning to undress.

As he turns around, Richie sort of regrets teasing him; the scar on his stomach stands out clearly, a distorted, raised letter H carved into his belly. But then he just keeps going until he's down to his boxer briefs and dips himself into the water, almost directly into Bev's waiting arms. Objectively, yeah, Ben is very hot, but Richie has to admit it's in a distant, unimportant sort of way, no more immediately engrossing than any of his other friends swimming about in their skivvies.

Then the song changes over, and Richie's eyes go wide. He whips his head down to catch Eddie's reaction.

_"I try to discover… a little something to make me sweeter…"_

"No," Eddie says, looking to Richie in shock. "No fucking way."

_"Oh baby, refrain," _Richie sings, joining in with the track, _"from breaking my heart."_

"You psychotic asshole, I cannot believe you!"

_"I'm so in love with you… I'll be forever blue…"_

"I feel like I'm missing something," Ben says. Bev's arms are draped around his neck, and she tries to get him to sway with the music in the water.

"Is this Erasure?" Mike looks at Richie with a look of pure bafflement.

"Yes, it is fucking Erasure, Richie, you moronic turd, I can't believe--"

_"That you give me no reason, why you're making me work so hard! That you give me no, that you give me no, that you give me no, that you give me no--"_

_"Soul, I hear you calling,"_ Bev sings, joining in with carefree abandon. Ben looks equal parts startled and delighted at the impromptu karaoke session.

_"Oh baby, pleeeeeeease! Give a little respeeeeeect! Tooooooo meeeeeeee!"_ As the crescendo builds, Bev and Richie's voices crack and meld into a discordant screech. The two of them break off, laughing uncontrollably while Eddie hurls insults at Richie.

"This does not settle our stolen cassette dispute, dickwad!"

"You'll eat your streaming mp3 or whatever the fuck this is, and you'll like it," Richie says, flicking Eddie's reflection in the water so that it ripples out.

"Don't fucking flick my face, you dick!"

Richie flicks it two more times, just to hear him sputter. "If I'm gonna give you back your tape, you have to give me back my shirt."

"It's probably in a fucking landfill by now!"

"Sounds like a you problem, my good bitch."

They splash around for a while, enjoying the odd contrast of the cool autumn air around their heads and the bath-like warmth of the pool. Richie has allowed Ben and Bev their little New Kids on the Block inside joke, but he's loaded the playlist with a few other yesteryear hits, and every time a new song starts up it's met with an odd mixture of cheers and groans.

"I'm gonna get changed. You said there are towels in the closet?" Mike starts to climb out, trying to shake himself dry so as not to drip too terribly all over Ben's floors.

"Oh, shit, I forgot," Ben says. "Yeah, there should be a few, sorry."

"No problem," he says, and tiptoes back into the house with his clothes in a heap tucked under his arm.

"I'm never getting out of this pool," Richie says, floating around with his arms akimbo. The blue afternoon sky is fading into soft pinks and purples, and the steam fogs the air around him, lending everything a hazy, dreamlike quality. "I don't care. Dry land cold and bad, pool warm and good."

"You're gonna get all pruny and disgusting," Eddie says.

"Don't give a shit. I'll be your California Raisin, babe."

"I am terrified to ask what that even means," says Stan.

"You won't be my _anything_ unless you shut the fuck up," says Eddie.

Then, "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" comes on and they have to drop everything to sing along. Eddie doesn't really know the words that well, and Stan outright refuses to sing, except near the end when he joins in for an exaggeratedly deep command to _"DANCE,"_ and then the rest of them are laughing so hard it triggers a coughing fit in Richie.

"I wanna get those _Ghost Adventures_ douchebags in here," Richie says, wiping tears from his eyes. "Get them to record some of this shit. Like yeah, we're communicating with the souls of the dead, they fucking love 80s pop. Put that in your spirit box and smoke it."

Another New Kids bop starts to play, and Bev and Ben start making goo-goo eyes at each other, so Richie relents and braves the cold air again, dripping all over Ben's patio.

"I gotta pee," he says, jogging over to grab his pile of clothes and slide his glasses back on. "Actually pee and not fake pee to cover up my being a giant pussy. Be right back."

He feels a little bit bad about the wet footprints he leaves all down the hallway on Ben's extremely expensive hardwood floors, but less bad when he sees he's not the only person who tracked water inside. He's just remembered that Mike and Bill never actually came back when he stumbles into exactly why that is.

The door to the bedroom is ajar. Richie can see a slice of bare skin. Bill's holding a towel up around his waist, his hair lank and dripping. Mike's fingers are buried in it.

Eddie makes a choking sound. Bill breaks away from Mike, whipping around in alarm.

"Shit," Richie says, averting his eyes. "Shit, sorry?" He can practically hear the car-screeching sound of his brain refusing to compute this. "Shit, I'll just-- I just gotta-- sorry." He rushes into the bathroom and shuts the door behind himself. The room is still faintly steamy, the floor damp. He relieves himself, his brain a fog of white noise while Eddie mutters behind him, _"What the fuck? What the fuck?"_

He's washing his hands for Eddie's benefit when his brain catches up with his eyes. "What the _fuck?"_ He glances around the room looking for the closet, finds a towel, gives himself the fastest wipedown possible, leaps into his pants, and stumbles back out of the bathroom still only half dressed. This is a confrontation he at least needs to have with pants on. His underwear is still wet, but that is a problem for future Richie.

In the hallway, Bill has emerged dressed and looking extremely agitated. Mike looks a lot calmer-- not ashamed, but a little embarrassed. When he sees Richie, Bill practically turns purple.

"Hey," Richie says. _"What the fuck?"_

"Richie-- Look, I'm sorry, it's--"

"How long?"

Bill says, "Only just now," at the same time Mike says, "A little while." Bill looks at him in shock.

"What," Mike says. "Are you gonna tell me you had no clue?"

"No, I just-- I wasn't s-sure until-- I mean, I didn't know you were--"

"Okay, whatever, I don't need the play by play, many happy returns," Richie says, and stomps away to dig through his bag for an actual change of clothes.

"Richie, wait," Mike says.

"No, dude, it's cool, I'll get out of your hair. Sorry for cockblocking. God, I feel like I fucking wet myself, this is disgusting." He shuffles back into the bathroom with his fresh clothes and slams the door.

He can hear the two of them muttering outside the door.

"I think he's…"

"No, it's not that…"

The voices fade down the hallway. Richie lets out a breath, knocking his head against the door.

What is he feeling? Is he mad? Why the fuck should he be mad? He should be happy for them. They're figuring their shit out, obviously. It's a good thing. And he's not as alone as he thought he was. Not remotely, actually. It's almost hilarious how completely wrong he'd been his entire life about being the only one, the one nobody would ever understand.

That just kind of makes him angrier. He buries his hands in his hair and tugs, groaning in frustration. "What the fuck is my _life."_

"Are you okay?" Eddie asks. Richie walks over to the bathroom mirror to see him properly. He scrubs his hands through the tangle of his hair.

"I don't fucking know. Are you?"

"I… I don't know."

"I don't know why I'm so bent out of shape about this, like who the fuck cares if Bill and Mike want to play grab-ass. They're adults, they have the right to grab as much ass as they want."

"I think I might not be okay," Eddie says. He looks down, shamefaced.

"Okay," Richie says. "Why?"

Eddie doesn't respond for a long time. He just stares and stares at the floor, his eyes dark and glittering. The lines in his face deepen, his mouth curving into a frown.

"I can't touch you," he says, barely a whisper. He swallows, his throat bobbing. "It's not fair."

Richie feels like the air's been punched out of him, because yeah. That's what it is. He's jealous. He feels like a shitheel about it, but there it is.

"I keep thinking about all these times when I could've-- or when I did, but I was trying not to think too hard about it, and just pretending I didn't know what it meant, and-- God fucking damn it, Richie, this _sucks."_

Richie's head is swimming, because he knows exactly what Eddie's talking about, and it drives him fucking insane to think that they were both thinking the same thing, all those years, too scared to push it too far. A hand on Eddie's back in the hallway, brief and warm. A finger flicking Eddie's hair out of his eyes, shoved away with a frown. Eddie's cheek pinched between his thumb and forefinger. An arm slung around Eddie's neck, wrestling him to the floor, pinning him down as he thrashes and flails and his protests turn to laughter. Ignorable, excusable, absolutely inextricable from the secret of Richie's want.

And there was Eddie, too-- climbing into an occupied hammock, pulling Richie into bed, shoving him under the water and watching him sputter, hands slippery but solid on Richie's shoulders. And then other things, like the quiet focus with which he'd wash debris away from a scrape on Richie's knee and apply one of the band-aids he always had stocked in one of his fanny packs for emergencies. The time he'd stolen Richie's glasses, and lied, saying he was worried he had astigmatism, and Richie had to grapple with him to get them back, laughing and cursing.

The time Richie had described his Derry Escape Plan that started with getting into UCLA, and Eddie had grabbed the end of his shirt and said, "I'm never gonna get out of here," and Richie had stopped, and leaned against the fence post and said, "Of course you are, dumbass, you're coming with me." And Eddie had nodded, like he didn't really believe it was true, but he wanted to anyway, and leaned against him, their arms brushing, his head just barely touching Richie's shoulder.

All those moments had been pointing to something that neither of them were ready or able to name, and now they were finally here together, and it was too late. Those brief points of contact were all they'd ever have.

"I can't keep doing this, it's-- it fucking _sucks_, and it's not just not being able to touch you, it's _everything_, I can't be _stuck_ like this forever. I wanted to see you again, and be with everyone again, I really did, but--"

"Are you saying you wanna die?" Richie feels like he can't breathe.

"I'm already dead," Eddie says. "I'm here, but not really _here_. I feel like I'm already half gone."

"You-- I mean, that's better than all the way gone. Stan came back, too. If you're both here now, maybe there's a way to-- to fix it, or--"

"I don't think so, Richie."

Richie can't look at him. He can't. If he looks at him, he's going to lose it.

"We probably scared the shit out of Bill," Richie says, rubbing his eyes under his glasses and slicking back his hair. "I should-- I should get back out there and, I dunno. Tell him it's chill. Or scare him more, I haven't decided which."

"Richie--"

"Can-- can we talk about this later? I'm sorry, I just--" Richie changes his clothes properly, tugging his shirt back on, straightening his glasses. "I have to go back out there." He avoids Eddie's eyes as he hurries out of the bathroom, taking a stack of towels with him when he goes. He uses one to mop up the mess he left on the floor.

Bill and Mike are huddled in the living area, talking in hushed tones. Bill looks to Richie again with the determined, now-see-here kind of look that Bill is famous for, and Richie feels like a prize-winning douchebag.

"Richie, I want to say--"

"No, fuck that, you don't owe me an explanation," Richie says, barreling right over him. "You caught me off guard and I was a dick about it."

Bill deflates a little, his righteous energy left with no target. He nods, pursing his lips. "Well, it's kind of fair after how I acted earlier. It…" He sighs, searching for the words. "You gave me a lot to think about. And you too, Eddie," he says, turning to face Eddie in the reflection on the back windows. "But I didn't mean to keep anything from you guys. There's just… a lot going on up here right now." He taps his temple, shrugging.

Eddie is quiet, but Richie can feel his eyes on him like breath on his neck. He grits his teeth, trying to stay focused on Bill.

"Yeah, well, you know I'm a delicate little petunia. So you just think about that next time, Kirk Douglas," Richie says. Bill and Mike make twin faces of bemusement. They really are a matched set.

Richie throws open the back door to the sight of Ben and Bev very politely not making out in front of their dead friend's ghost.

"Here, cover up, sluts," he says, tossing the towels over so that they land by the edge of the pool. Ben and Bev follow his lead. It's getting darker and colder, and Bev shivers violently as she towels off her hair and wraps herself up, gathering her clothes and jogging back indoors with a quick "thank you" to Richie.

She and Ben rejoin the group after a few minutes, having changed into more comfortable lounging clothes. Ben lights the gas fireplace and turns on some warm, soft lights that really make the place feel like some kind of ski lodge exclusively for the wealthiest heirs and heiresses. Richie's half a second away from asking if Ben minds having two roommates.

The mood is a lot more subdued now than it was an hour ago. Eddie is quiet and withdrawn. Bill is tense, Mike contemplative. Ben offers to make tea, which Richie accepts under the condition that he can add whiskey to his. It's been that kind of day. Fuck, it's been that kind of life.

Richie stands suddenly, his palms itching. He blusters past Ben, muttering a request to fuck with his furniture but not waiting for permission. He goes straight to the giant mirror in the entryway and lifts it off its hanger, arms wrapped awkwardly around the frame. He groans with the effort of lifting it-- it's way fucking heaver than the piece of shit mirror he's got at home, which he either got from Ikea or stole from someone he used to live with who got it from Ikea.

"Woah, woah, Richie--" Ben drops what he's doing to dash in, grabbing the other end of the mirror and helping Richie balance it. Ben doesn't stop him from taking it down, though. He just follows Richie's lead as he hauls it into the living room, where they lean it up against the glass window-walls and gently set it down. Eddie and Stan are that much more visible, now, solid reflections rather than translucent, distorted things.

"There," Richie says. "Like real fucking people."

Eddie still avoids his eyes, but Stan smiles faintly, his eyes creasing at the corners.

"Thank you," he says. Richie's heart aches. "All of you," Stan adds. He's perched on the end of the couch, now, his hands clasped in his lap. "It was a shitty reason for everyone to have to come out, but it feels sort of like a real party now."

Richie agrees, in that it now feels a lot like one of those depressing college parties he drank and smoked his way through out of desperation. The ones where you went because you stupidly had a crush on some jackass who was gonna be there, and then he leaves with a girl from his Sociology class and you smoke a bowl and pretend you don't care. He hates that it feels like that. This is supposed to be better than that. This is supposed to be where he feels like part of a whole picture again, rather than just a fragmented scatter of puzzle pieces.

But it's not his party, or at least it shouldn't be. It's Stan's and Eddie's. He needs to get over himself. If this really is their last hurrah, it needs to be a good one, for their sakes. Richie's gonna see to that, as soon as he's got another drink in him. Ben hands him a steaming mug, and he wastes no time topping it off with whiskey.

"I guess maybe it's more like a funeral, though, huh," Stan says. He's focused on his own hands, his curls tumbling into his eyes. "I guess people don't usually get to show up for their own."

"We went to the quarry," Mike says. "One last time, before we left Derry. I think that was as close as we got to a memorial."

"Seems kind of shitty, huh? Like we should have at least lit some candles and poured out a 40 for you guys," Richie says. He doesn't particularly want to think about the quarry. Eddie's blood had washed away in that water. His glasses had needed to be replaced, but the broken pair is still sitting in his side table drawer at home, like an anchor, or maybe more like cement shoes. He had managed not to think about them for a few weeks, until now. There's still a little line of dried blood caught in one of the fractures.

"I went back to the Barrens," Mike says. "After the rest of you left. The spot where we met."

"The rock fight," Bev says wistfully.

"You nailed Bowers so hard," Ben says, looking up at her with admiration.

_"I'll save you, little lady,"_ Bev says in a goofy cowboy voice, laughter putting color in her cheeks.

"I'd had a lot of people telling me how to stay in line, when I was a kid. Telling me what I had to do to keep out of trouble, looking the other way when I was up to my neck in it. But that was the first time someone else stood up and protected me, I think. The first time someone came to defend me." Mike sighs, lost in the memory. "I'd just met you, but I think after that I just knew. I'd do anything for you guys, cause you did that for me." Bill gives him a smile and squeezes his leg.

"I-- I went back to my old house. Where the kid--" Bill breaks off, his smile fading. "I d-don't know that anyone knew what happened to him. They closed the fair down when he d-disappeared, but there wasn't any evidence left behind. Just like the others. I don't think his parents knew for certain he was--" He breaks off, swallowing hard, his shoulders shaking.

"Jesus," Ben whispers.

Mike nods, touching Bill's back gently. "Some of the other attacks had witnesses, but you know the cops. They weren't going to listen to any of it. I doubt that'll change, even with It being gone."

Bill nods, his eyes wet. "I couldn't-- Like, what would I say? Hey, promise I'm not a psycho killer, but your son's d--" Bill has to stop to force the word out. "Dead." He draws in a shuddering breath. "My parents forgot Georgie. _I_ forgot Georgie. I don't know if they'll forget too, if they'll just go on like nothing… like nothing ever happened. But I don't… I didn't want to forget. I made him a promise, that I wouldn't forget."

"It's hard," Bev says, gazing into her mug. She had on a little makeup earlier in the day, but their swim washed it away, and her eyelashes are pale gold against her bare cheeks. "All I wanted to do was forget everything, you know? Like, who wants to remember the worst thing that ever happened to them?" She takes a careful sip, and Ben strokes her knee with his thumb, soothing. "But when I remembered-- it was like I'd been in this haze where things just happened to me, and I didn't know why I reacted to them how I did. I was being crushed into a mold, and I didn't know how to break out of it, and then I _remembered--_ and it was like the whole thing just fell away, and I knew what shape I could be. If I wanted to."

Ben nods along, then rests his temple against the inside of Bev's knee. "All these things about myself I'd never bothered to think about made sense all of the sudden."

"I, uh," Richie says, his throat dry. He sips his drink, letting the warmth suffuse through him. "I went to the, uh. The kissing bridge? After I split off from the rest of you guys." He taps his foot against the floor, buzzing with anxious energy.

"Why there?" It's the first thing Eddie's said aloud since Richie brushed him aside. He's looking at him so intently it makes Richie's face go hot.

"I wanted to see if-- I carved some initials into it when I was a kid, and like, I needed to know they were still there. And to say-- to say goodbye. To the person whose..." Richie splits the skin on his lip chewing on it. "To you." Richie can't quite read Eddie's expression, and it makes him so jittery he wants to start pacing around the room. "I was thirteen, okay," he says petulantly after a moment. "Cut me a fucking break, man."

"Oh, honey," Bev says softly.

"I know, I know, you can't possibly give me any wedgies I haven't already given myself about it. I've sucked dick in a public bathroom and it's still about the gayest shit I've ever done."

Mike snorts loudly, then muffles the sound behind his fist. Sometimes when Richie makes a joke, people don't laugh so much as react like someone just punched them in the solar plexus, or set off an airhorn in their ear, and that is the reaction he draws from most everyone else in the room.

"Shit," he mutters, hiding the redness of his face in his shoulder, "that didn't even warrant a 'beep beep'?"

"That's at least ten beeps on the beep scale, I think," Stan says quietly.

"I wanted to make sure it was still there, because like..." Richie's voice is partially muffled by his sleeve. "I wanted to make sure I'd been there. That it was real, that it really happened. Derry just… all of us, it just dug its claws in us, and I just wanted to dig back. Make a mark on it that meant something good."

Richie hears a sound, a breath released, and when he looks up, Stan's eyes are wet.

"Do you think I did anything," he says, as quiet as he can be and still be heard, "anything at all that mattered?"

"Of fucking course you did, Stanley," Richie says immediately. "I was _this _close to running away. This close. You kept me from doing it. Whether you knew it or not, I felt you with me there, man. I wouldn't have fucking gotten through it otherwise."

"Isn't that what I did though? I was… I was _happier_, forgetting. I was actually _happy_." Misery contorts Stan's features, his voice hitching. "I swore I'd never forget, and when I remembered, all I did was run away. What good did that do? What did I leave behind except a-- a fucking mess?"

"You can't take it back, Stan," Eddie says. He's sitting beside Stan on the couch. He takes Stan's hand in his and gives it a squeeze. "But I don't think you were here for no reason."

"You died," Stan says, his voice a frail, broken thing.

"Yeah. I can't take that back either. But that wasn't you. That was It. It did this to us. To you, to me, to all of us. We didn't make it out. But It didn't get to fucking win." Eddie stands up, putting his hands on Stan's shoulders. Eddie startles him by flicking him on the nose, hard.

"Ah--ow?" Stan sounds sort of offended, but mostly confused.

"I told you it wasn't your fault, and I meant it, shitbird. I'm not gonna tell you it was a good thing, but I'm not gonna tell you I blame you, either. Richie basically had to drag me in by the balls. Bill fucking yelled at me."

"Bill yelled at you?" Stan frowns over at Bill.

"Yeah, he's a real asshole," Eddie says.

"Wh-- hey now--" Bill sputters.

"Now, one, I maintain I didn't drag you so much as lovingly coax you like the Horse Whisperer, but for human men who fold their clean underwear into perfect squares," Richie interjects. "But yeah, fuck Bill to be honest, like what's his problem?"

"Guys, come on!"

Bev and Ben fall into a fit of giggles while Mike tries to soothe Bill's wounded pride, barely concealing his own laughter. Richie stays focused on Eddie and Stan, though. Eddie seems to have broken through to him; the two of them share a slightly tear-stained smile, and Stan lowers his head, shaking off the worst of the melancholy. Richie can't look away. He loves the two of them so fiercely, so proudly.

The night winds down sluggishly, like their reluctance to let it end has the power to slow time. At one point, Bev crawls up onto the kitchen counter to pull down a bag of something from up on top of the cabinets-- at first Richie thinks it's more weed, but it turns out to be a bag of assorted candy from one of those bulk candy stores. Apparently, even Ben hadn't known about _this_ stash. She sets the bulging plastic bag in the middle of the room and lets everyone have their pick. Bill goes straight for the licorice, which has Richie sticking out his tongue in disgust. Nobody else seems to like it either, even Bev herself, which begs the question of why and when she bought it.

"I actually bought it when I was waiting at the airport to fly back to Derry for the first time," she says, and plucks the head off a gummy bear with her front teeth. "It was so stupidly overpriced, but I don't know, I just walked past and really wanted it for some reason. I still haven't even managed to eat like, an eighth of it. But it reminded me of that busted old five-and-dime we used to go to, remember?"

"Nelson's Country Store," Mike says, smiling. He grabs a handful of spice drops. "It closed, maybe four years ago?"

"Shit, seriously? Nothing good ever fucking stays in Derry," Richie says, gnawing on a gummy cola bottle. It pairs remarkably well with whiskey and tea. "Uh, 'cept for you, Mikey."

That prompts Mike to talk more about the next places he'd like to visit in his travels. Bill has a list of places out west that are actually worth seeing and not overhyped; he insists the Grand Canyon isn't all it's cracked up to be, but Mike is determined to see it, out of a sense of completion at the very least.

"I don't guess you guys wanna go sightseeing at the bodega around the corner from my apartment," Richie says. He pops a banana-flavored Runt into his mouth. "No ancient landmarks laden with history or whatever, but there's a scraggly little cat with a blind eye that sleeps in the produce bins."

"That can't possibly be up to code," Eddie says.

"She is a mighty slayer of mice," Richie says like a haughty lordling. "It is only right that we pay her oranges in tribute."

"You inviting us to stay with you, Rich?" Bill smiles, and Richie ducks his head bashfully.

"Yeah, I mean, whatever, I'm sure you're sick of LA, but I got some room. Pull-out couch, air mattress. Come sleep on my floor. You guys too," Richie says, and pokes Ben's knee with his foot. "I'm gonna have to write some new fucking jokes sooner or later, and I need to measure how hard you guys cringe before I'll know if they're shit."

"Oh, so we're only going to listen to your act," Bev says, grimacing. "Yeah, I dunno if I can make it."

"You haven't even heard the one I've got about fucking the Brawny paper towel man."

"Beep beep, Richie."

"He's a pretty considerate hookup, 'cause he cleans up after, but he always goes in dry--"

_"Beep beep, Richie!"_

\--

The conversation slows to a comfortable crawl. Mike spawls out on the floor, his head propped up on Bill's thigh while Bill runs his fingertips across his hair sleepily, his eyes drifting shut as he listens to Mike talk about quantum physics and multiverse theory and a bunch of other weird shit that kind of makes Richie's eyes cross. When Ben starts snoring softly against Bev's knee, his mouth drooping open, that's when she reluctantly decides it's time to call it a night.

"Wake up, hon," she says, nudging his shoulder. "Time to head bedward."

"Huh? Oh, yeah," Ben says, only half-conscious. "Um. Guest bedroom…"

"There's a queen in the spare room," Bev says helpfully. "And I can bring out a pillow and some blankets for the couch, too."

"Go on and take the room, you guys," Richie says to Mike and Bill. Bill looks like he's about to very nobly protest, but Richie silences him with a pointed look at the man in his lap, and Bill relents. "I've slept in bathtubs, a couch is great. I'm pretty sure Ben's couch is nicer than my mattress anyway."

Before he and Bill leave, Mike gives them all a crushing hug good night, in true Mike fashion. Bev leads sleep-dazed Ben to bed, and returns alone with a couple of folded-up quilts and a fluffy pillow, which she sets on the couch for Richie. She gives him a hug too, and a peck on the cheek for good measure.

"Good night."

"G'night," Richie says, but before he lets her go, he turns to look at Stan, who is watching the two of them with Eddie. Eddie has Stan's two hands clasped in his tightly. Stan gives them a soft smile.

"Good night, Richie," he says.

The air in Richie's lungs suddenly feels too thick. He thinks there's probably something more he ought to say, but he doesn't quite know what that would be, and all that comes out is, "Night, Stanley."

Then Bev and Stan are gone, and it's just Richie and Eddie and a silent living room.

Richie sits by the mirror, and waits for Eddie to do the same. He allows himself to sweat under Eddie's stare. When he's actually mad, and not just quit-yanking-my-pigtails mad, or this-is-how-we-show-our-affection mad, Eddie doesn't yell or sputter or curse. He just gets quiet. It's like when Richie's parents, instead of yelling at him to _come downstairs right now, wiseass_, or taking away his Nintendo, just got real still and told him in an even tone that they were _disappointed_. It's worse than _anything_, having Eddie legitimately, no-joke pissed at him.

"Okay," Richie says, "so if you were physically capable of doing so, I would invite you to kick me in the nuts so hard they become permanently lodged in my molars."

"If I were physically capable, I would've done that with or without your permission."

"Okay, good, I'm glad we've established the kicking my nuts deserve and the severity thereof."

"I can't remember you ever blowing me off like that before," Eddie says, and Richie winces, 'cause yeah, that one hurts. "Like… I'm pretty used to being steamrolled. I'm pro-league at it. But not by you. Not like that. Not when it matters."

"I think," Richie says, meekly, like a dog with his tail between his legs, "we've established my being a gaping asshole. I'm… look, Eds, I'm really fucking sorry. I know I fucked up."

"I'm not," Eddie says, stopping and starting again with a deepening frown, "I'm not your _prop_, Richie."

"Of course you're not. The fuck does that mean?"

"You called me a frog in a jar."

"I told you I don't fucking want you to be a frog in a jar!"

"Well, _good_. 'Cause I'm _not_."

"All right, so now we have established that I am a sphincter and you are _not _a frog, glad we had this talk."

"I'm not alive, either." Eddie's face falters with the declaration. "Like, you can joke around about ghosts and whatever, but I'm not _back_. This isn't a _solution_. I think it's just… I don't know. A transition."

"Yeah, thanks, I got that." Richie picks at the fibers on his jeans, watching Eddie's hands where they're gripping his knees tightly. He wants to grab them, to feel the knobs of Eddie's knuckles under his thumbs, to see the way the dark hairs stand on end, to find out by touch how much his hands have changed from when they were kids.

"Then don't treat me like you can pretend this away. Whether we like it or not, this is something you're gonna have to live with, eventually."

"Maybe I don't want to."

"Fucking come on."

"No, I mean-- _fuck."_ Richie's hand tightens into a fist, and he punches his thigh hard enough to hurt. "Maybe I really fucking do not want to have to live with this. You get what I mean? Like I legit do not care if I--" He swallows the rest of the sentence, regretting it before it's even out of his mouth.

"Richie-- what the _fuck."_

"I said maybe," Richie mumbles, and his eyes dart around the room looking for anything to focus on that isn't Eddie. "This is coming out wrong. Fuck. That was a fucked up thing to say to somebody."

"You _think?"_

"I don't-- I don't mean-- But I did. I really did. You don't understand, you didn't-- you didn't see. I was ready to die. For a minute there, I really just did not give a shit. I would have done _anything_ to stay down there with you in that fucking hole while it collapsed on top of us. I fucking _tried _to stay, but they dragged me out. They _dragged_ me. I almost got them killed too, probably. But I didn't care. I would've stayed. I would've stayed."

"You cannot fucking say that shit to me," Eddie says.

"I know."

"That's a really fucked up thing to say, asshole!"

"I know, I know it's fucked."

"Don't fucking say shit like that! Promise me you're not gonna do some stupid, fucked up shit!"

"I mean, you have met me right? Stupid, fucked up shit is, like--"

"Promise me, you _complete dickhead."_

"--it's literally the name on my birth certificate, like the state had to issue my mom and dad a citation for naming me Stupid Fucked Up Shit Tozier--"

_"Richie. Please."_ Eddie smacks his hand against the barrier of the mirror, startling Richie into shutting up and looking at him. "When I'm gone… when I'm _really_ gone, I'm not gonna be able to look out for you anymore. You have to promise me you're gonna take care of yourself."

"Okay," Richie relents. "Okay, I promise."

"Thank you. Jesus fuck."

"I'm-- I wasn't trying to say-- fuck, I'm not like, trying to manipulate you into staying so you have to take care of me for the rest of my dumbshit life."

"I _want_ to take care of you for the rest of your dumbshit life," Eddie says, soft but adamant. "Sometimes I think that's the only thing I'm really proud of doing, you know? And if things were different… I think I'd be really happy. Making sure you're sleeping right and eating right and all that other stupid shit."

"Telling me to wear sunscreen to go to the corner store?" Richie tries to smile, but it feels weak and brittle.

"Skin cancer's no joke, Richie, you should always wear sunscreen," Eddie mutters, and his mouth twists. "I hope you don't think I want to leave you, Rich. I really hope you don't think that. I wanna stay so bad it's killing me."

"Yeah?" Richie leans against the mirror, resting his temple against the frame.

"Yeah. 'Cause I know you'd take care of me, too. You never treated me like I was a baby, but you were always looking out for me, even when it didn't look like you were. But you never treated me like I was helpless. You… you saw more in me than anybody else, I think. I don't know why."

"I think," Richie says with a sigh, "I think maybe it was always my dream to fuck a guy that looks like an accountant."

Eddie snorts out a laugh, his frown breaking. "You dumb motherfucker."

"I don't know if I think 'love at first sight' is real or what," Richie says. He's staring at his hands, trying to find the words. "I really don't know what that even means. But it's like Mike said earlier, I guess. I saw you and I guess I just kinda knew. I saw you with your square-ass haircut and your shorts pulled up to your armpits and your fuckin' fanny pack and it was like, oh, yeah. There he is." He looks up to find Eddie watching him, his dark eyes catching the firelight. "That's the one. I pick him." His shoulder jerks, a weak little shrug. "So yeah. I guess I've loved you since I can remember. And I don't want you to just be... something that happened to me, you know? You deserve better than that."

Eddie appears to breathe shakily, leaning his temple against the mirror in reverse of Richie, like they've done before. "What do you think I deserve?"

"Top of the list? You deserve to get blown 24/7."

Eddie's eyes go wide. "All day? Jesus, I'd chafe after a while. Or at least get, like, prune dick."

"Okay," Richie says, "I'd intersperse it with meals and bathroom breaks and allow you a refractory period of your choosing between blowjobs."

"That's super fucking benevolent of you, dude."

"Yeah, man, I'm a real giver. We start the day with a beej-- slurp slurp, glug glug, very nice. Then I'll make you breakfast. What do you eat?"

"Wait, I'm-- I'm gonna need you to run that one by me again?"

"Breakfast or beejays?"

Eddie opens his mouth, then closes it. "You know what, never mind, just go ahead with breakfast."

"I asked you what you usually eat. Please don't tell me it's Soylent or some stupid techbro shit like that."

"At breakfast? Usually just coffee."

"What kind of coffee?"

Eddie stills, his eyes narrowing. "You're gonna be a dick about it."

"Edward, darling, I swear to you, I will not be a dick about whatever stupid unnecessary bullshit you do to your fancy coffee for special boys."

"Fuck you."

"What, do you drink some stupidly complicated thing with stevia and fifteen shots of espresso?"

"Fuck you, man."

"I'm serious, what could possibly be so bad about your morning joe? Oh shit, do you have a secret vice for the frou-frou rainbow vomit drinks? Been hiding your dairy habit from the wife?"

"I drink vegan bulletproof coffee," Eddie declares. Richie's face contorts.

"Willingly?"

"Fuck all the way off."

"Okay, so fuck whatever nasty fad diet shit you've been choking down instead of eating actual food like God intended. I'm making you normal human coffee and pancakes."

"Sometimes I had oat yogurt," Eddie adds petulantly.

"Holy shit, call the New York Times, sometimes he had _oat yogurt_. The _fuck_ is oat yogurt?"

"It's yogurt made out of oat milk, dumbshit! Dairy, soy, gluten-free--"

"You know you're not actually allergic to any of that shit, right? Jesus Christ, that's dire."

"Yeah, dude, I am aware of that now."

"'Cause the more you talk about all the dietary restrictions, the more it just kind of sounds like an eating disorder."

"Can you please fucking focus?"

"Pancakes. Buttermilk. Shitloads of syrup. The fake stuff."

"Okay, loading me up on carbs and corn syrup. What then?"

"Uh… seriously, I just told you, blowjobs."

"You really wanna suck dick at 9 AM?"

"First off, we're up at 10 at the _very_ earliest, so it's more like noon by then. Secondly, I already gave you a 'good morning' blowjob before breakfast--"

"How fucking long does it take you to make pancakes?"

"--but whatever, I'd suck your dick any time of day. Dick is an all-the-time meal."

"Please don't talk about my dick like you're gonna serve it with fava beans and Chianti."

"No, idiot, we're serving it with pancakes, pay attention!"

"You're not getting your nasty, sticky fake syrup mouth on my dick. If we do that, we're taking a fucking shower first."

"Okay, sexy, shower time it is. You can fuck me in the shower and then--"

"No, no, no, no, do you know how many safety hazards there are to something like that, there's no way--"

"'Yes, And,' motherfucker, 'Yes, And'! Quit shitting on my fantasy!"

"It's my fantasy, too, and you're not gonna slip and brain yourself on the bathroom tile in it!" Eddie looks sincerely offended until he adds, "I'll fuck you in bed."

Richie grins, wide and gleeful. "Yes. Fuck yes. Now you're fucking talking, dude."

Eddie breaks into a helpless, wheezing laugh, which just makes Richie grin even harder. Making Eddie laugh, that was what made every stupid thing he'd ever done worth it. His laughter is such a rare, goofy, endearing thing, and Richie's heart swells with it.

Richie pulls the pillow and one of the quilts off the couch to lay down next to the mirror while Eddie's laughter subsides. He doesn't want to sleep yet, but he's afraid of falling asleep propped against the mirror and making it slide onto the ground or something stupid like that, because his chin keeps drooping against it.

Quiet blankets the room again, and it’s dark but for the dim glow of the fire. If Ben's pillow smelled more like Richie's sweat and the antiperspirant he used in high school, Eddie curled up next to him in the faint warm light would be a familiar scene. Eddie keeps watching Richie's face, even as his eyes start to involuntarily flutter closed.

"Richie?" Eddie's voice comes softly in the stillness.

"Yeah, Eddie?" Richie answers with his eyes closed, trying to focus on Eddie's voice to stay awake. If he leaves his glasses on, he's not really going to bed, he tells himself.

"Do you think there's anything, like… after?"

"You mean like Heaven?"

"Yeah, I guess. Or whatever. Something else, or just… nothing at all."

"I have no fucking clue," Richie says. "You'd know better than I would." He thinks on it distantly for a moment, imagining a swirl of dazzling lights, hypnotic in their pulsating, as he pinches the soft fiber of the pillowcase between his thumb and forefinger. No. He doesn't want to think about that. "I wonder if Mr. T is there."

"Mr. T is still alive, dumbfuck."

"No, no," Richie mumbles into the pillow. "Mr. T, my hamster?"

"Your fu--" Richie can hear Eddie sputtering, and it makes him smile. "You really think your hamster is in Heaven?"

"Of fucking course he is, what are you, a monster? He was a kickass hamster until he escaped and ate all that couch stuffing."

"Yeah, Rich," Eddie says. "Yeah, I'm sure Mr. T is in Heaven just going hard on some heavenly pellets or something."

"Yeah, he totally is. I'm glad. Something to look forward to." Ben's pillow smells nice, if unfamiliar. Fabric softener. Something. "I wonder if he'd remember me or not. Like I know hamsters have a brain the size of a pea, but maybe he would. Even if he doesn't really _remember_ remember. Like us, like… like Ben remembered, even though he didn't. And Bill, all his books. Now I think about it, I think it's all in there, in parts. All of us. And me, I think…" Richie yawns, a tear of exhaustion leaking out of the corner of his eye. "Even though I didn't really remember you... I feel like I was looking for you. In other people. In everything. Just trying to find something... even though I didn't remember what it was. You know...?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I know, Richie," Eddie says, but Richie is already asleep.

\---

In his dream, he's at Stanley's house holding a trash bag. He's grabbing styrofoam cups and plates and shoving them in until the bag bulges, returning the Uris home to its usual immaculate state piece by piece. It's dusk, which this far into the summer means it's getting pretty late in the day. A couple of Stan's relatives have remained to gab with Mr. and Mrs. Uris, who aren't helping them clean up at all, he notices, but hey, who is he to complain? He's Richie Tozier, so he complains about it loudly and at length.

"They paid for the whole party and set it all up," Mike says, covering the depleted platters of party food still sitting on the buffet table with long sheets of plastic wrap. "So I guess it's only fair we help them clean up." Mike is wearing his Sunday best, in sharp contrast with Richie, who's wearing the same loud garbage he always wears. He's filled out even more in the last year or so, Mike has, and he's taller even than Richie now. He looks handsome as hell, if Richie's honest, and it leaves him an odd blend of jealous and admiring. Like, who even has shoulders like that? He bumps his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with the back of his forearm.

"Let it be known I'm doing this for Stanley's sake and his alone," Richie says. He glances out the window, where Stan is stiffly standing next to his parents in the backyard while they shake hands and exchange hugs with some ancient man Richie's never seen before in his life. Richie grabs a cup someone wedged between two of Stan's Latin Club awards. (Who issues trophies for being really good at Latin? The state of Maine, apparently.) Stan's graduation cap and his diploma are already displayed in a place of honor alongside them.

"How did I get stuck with the bitch job, again," Eddie barks from the kitchen, where Richie can hear the running water and the clink of silverware. When Richie drags the trash bag in, he's wrist-deep in a sink full of water and suds wearing rubber kitchen gloves halfway to his elbows. Richie snorts out a laugh.

"If the apron fits," Richie says, giving him an once-over. Eddie yanks his hand out of the water and flicks his fingers at Richie, showering him with droplets of warm, soapy water. Richie cackles, ducking away. Eddie is loading the sudsy dishes into the dishwasher when he's done scrubbing them down, which defeats the purpose, if you ask Richie, which no one does.

"You have to pre-wash dishes before they go in the dishwasher, fuckface, don't you know anything," Eddie snaps, just as Mike says, unusually loudly from the other room, "Oh, hello, Mr. and Mrs. Uris! Thank you for hosting us!" Eddie's eyes widen, and his mouth slams shut. He starts scrubbing dishes again with renewed vigor.

"Thank you so much for your help, Michael," says Stan's mother. "Oh, why don't you just go on and take some of that food home with you? You can share it with your family." Richie ties off the trash bag, glancing back into the dining room, where Mike is shifting awkwardly holding a large, plastic-covered tray of egg salad sandwiches.

"I don't want to impose," he says, but she takes the tray and stacks it on top of another tray of sandwiches, loading them back into Mike's arms.

"Mike doesn't need fifty sandwiches, mom," Stan says.

"Don't be silly, I'm sure all that hard work makes you build up quite the appetite. We've got no room left in the refrigerator anyhow. I insist!"

"Well, thank you, Mrs. Uris," Mike says a little helplessly.

"Thank you all for coming, boys," Stan's father says in a tone that makes it sound more like, "Please get out of my home as soon as possible." Richie knows Stan's dad has never really liked him that much, and when he and Eddie are both over, the thinly-disguised impatience becomes even more apparent. For some reason, people tend to find the two of them obnoxious. There's no accounting for taste.

"No problem at all, Rabbi, you know I had a pretty full docket, but I always have time to pencil Donnie Uris and my boy Stan the Man in," Richie says. He holds the trash bag in one hand and offers the other for Stan's father to shake. Next to him, Stan's eyes go wide and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly. Richie pretends not to see him. "And Miz U, been missing you. Looking radiant as always, such a pleasure. You know I go nuts for that spinach dip, and you _always _bring your A game. Where you want the garbage?"

"Oh, just out on the curb is fine," Mrs. Uris replies, a little chilly. Mr. Uris reluctantly shakes Richie's hand.

"Right-o, chaps," Richie chirps, and turns to haul the trash out to the front.

"I swear to God, Richie, do you always have to say whatever stupid shit comes into your head?" Stan says later, when he's saying goodbye to the group of them. They're standing in the street in front of the house, Mike holding two stacks of uneaten finger sandwiches.

"Uh, yeah, have you met me?"

"Unfortunately," Eddie says, and punches Richie in the side. Richie recoils, letting out an exaggerated _oof!_ "You're such a dick, just be cool for one day before Stan's gone forever."

"He's not 'gone forever', it's a graduation party! We have a whole summer before we have to leave. And it's not like the second we leave Derry we just cease to fucking exist."

"A whole summer I have to continue to coexist peacefully with my parents, so if you could pretend to be normal for at least eighty percent of that time," Stan says, exhausted.

"You'd be so bored by normal," Richie says, throwing an arm over Stan's shoulder and ruffling his hair. "Normal's not memorable. Can't let you head on down to Georgia and forget all about your humble origins, can I?"

"I wish you would," Stan says. He glances back to the house. "All right, I guess I ought to go help them finish cleaning up."

"Buck up, Stan. You probably got like a hundred billion dollars in graduation gifts today."

Stan does smile a little at that. "I mean, I'm probably going to have to spend most of it on books, but…" He glances over at Mike, arms laden with leftovers, and the smile fades. "Uh, I guess I'll see you guys later. Thanks for only humiliating me in front of my parents and not my entire family."

"Anytime, Stanny Boy," Richie says, and claps him on the back.

Richie borrowed his mom's car to drive them. It might not be his, and it might be a wood-paneled minivan, but for Richie, it represents _freedom_. Mike sets the trays of sandwiches next to him in the backseat while Eddie claims shotgun. Eddie's mother doesn't know that Richie drove them; Eddie biked to Richie's house and left the bike there to throw her off their scent. If she knew she'd probably lock Eddie in the basement until it was time for him to move away to school, but what his mother doesn't know can't hurt him.

When the engine rumbles to life, The Temptations come singing out of the speakers, _Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to… _Richie peels off harder than is strictly necessary or advisable in a minivan, and Eddie grips the sides of his seat with both hands.

"So, gentlemen, what'll we do for our last summer of freedom?" Richie's already had a graduation party, and Eddie isn't having one at all. There are a couple more parties he and Eddie have managed to swing invitations to-- a couple of kids Richie was in the school's spring production of Guys and Dolls with, and one of Eddie's teammates from the Math Team, but none of those kids really know Mike, who is not invited, so Richie leaves the subject alone.

"Die, when you wrap this piece of shit van around a tree, if you keep driving like a fucking maniac," Eddie says, and his grip tightens on the door handle.

"Hey, the 1990 Chrysler Town & Country got _very_ high safety ratings, from what I hear," Richie says, and speeds up a little.

"Cut it the fuck out, Richie!"

"All right, all right! I'm slowing down," Richie says, and the van slows to a glacier's pace at ten miles per hour. They putz along through the neighborhood while Eddie hurls abuse at Richie, until they come out onto the main stretch. The cars behind Richie start to back up.

"I think the guy behind us is getting pissed," Mike says, glancing back every few seconds through the rear windshield. There's a pick-up truck swerving a little, back and forth, increasingly agitated.

"I'm just being a law abiding citizen," Richie protests.

_BEEP BEEP._ The car behind them honks twice and swerves wildly, tires screeching on the pavement, passing them on the wrong side of the road. The van continues at a crawl.

Mike breaks first, snorting, and then full-on barking with laughter. Eddie shakes his head, like he can't believe he's stuck in the car with two idiots, but soon he's laughing as well, little wheezes and shaking shoulders. Richie grins the whole way, until his face hurts, and brings the car back up to the speed limit. The sky is deep purple and edging into black as he draws further away from the town itself and closer to the outskirts, and Mike's house.

"There's still a load of work to do on the farm, but I'm thinking once you guys are gone, maybe I'll try to pick up some part time hours working at the library, too," Mike says, watching the businesses and buildings give way to stretches of meadow and forest.

"Yeah?" Richie glances back at Mike, his wistful expression lighting up in uneven passes of the street lights and porch lights as they drive past. "Don't get in enough alphabetizing in your day-to-day?"

"I like books," Mike says. "And maybe I'll get to meet some people besides butchers. I don't have a ton of free time, but it's gonna be…" Mike sighs, meeting Richie's eyes in the rear-view mirror. "It's gonna be really lonely without you guys."

"We're gonna miss the shit out of you, Mikey," Eddie says.

They don't talk about it so much anymore, but it's been a long time since they heard from any of their other friends. It kind of stings, to think all their childhood promises could fade away in the course of a year or two, but Richie supposes that's just how life goes sometimes. People grow in different directions. They move on. Richie doesn't know how he feels about that. Moving on from Derry, that's one thing, but his friends?

He looks to his right, to Eddie's profile outlined against the dark. It's hard enough to think about months from now, when he'll be two thousand miles away. The thought of drifting apart from Eddie, of never talking to him again, makes his throat close up.

Richie's ready to try to push the van's ability to climb up the patchy dirt road that leads up the hill to Mike's house, but Mike tells him to stop at the fence, and that he'll walk the rest of the way. Richie steals a sandwich from the tray before Mike hops out, and he waves goodbye with mayonnaise and yolk on his fingers.

"Try not to eat them all in one sitting," he calls out the window. "I know you're a growing boy, but it's inhumane to inflict egg farts on innocent farm animals!"

"Good night, guys!" Mike calls back.

Richie drives for a while in silence, except for the sound of the Oldies station and the wind rushing past the driver's side window. His scarred palm itches on the steering wheel, a two inch long reminder. For some reason he can't quite place, he just doesn't want the night to end yet. He blows past the turn towards home he's meant to take and keeps going, on into the night.

"Uh," Eddie says, craning his head around to watch the street sign pass. "You missed the turn, shithead."

"Nah," Richie says. "I don't wanna go home yet."

Richie can feel Eddie frowning at him. "Uh, well, I told my mom I'd be home by like, 10:30 at the latest, so…"

"Fuck that," Richie says. "She's only got her claws in you for a couple more months, so who cares? Blow her off."

"What? No, Richie, I can't just-- I mean, she'll lose her mind, man, you remember the last time? I fell asleep and lost track of time and she'd already called the fucking cops?"

"So let her call the fucking cops," Richie says. "You're not a kid. What are they gonna do, throw you in jail?"

"No, but-- Look, just turn around, dickwad!"

"You're telling me you'd rather go home and play kiss-ass with Mrs. K than make the most of your fading youth, damn the consequences? With this handsome motherfucker?" Richie looks over at Eddie and wags his eyebrows up and down.

Eddie really looks like he wants to argue, but even he can't say with honesty that he wants to go home to his mother right then. His mouth contracts into a tight line. Haltingly, he shakes his head, _no_.

"That's what I thought," Richie says, and veers toward the quarry.

Here's the thing: this never happened.

Richie drove them all home from Stan's party, yes. He dropped Mike off, and then he drove Eddie back to his house, and Eddie got on his bike and said, "See ya, Rich," and biked home, and that was that.

Richie grasped the steering wheel, driving Eddie back to his house, and watched his knuckles go white against the cracked leather, and he thought, "I don't want him to go," but he didn't say anything, and Eddie got on his bike, and he went.

Eddie sighed, a little noise of disappointment, like the air let out of a tire, and he got out of Richie's mom's van, and picked his bike up off the ground where he left it, by Richie's garage, and looked back at Richie like he had something to say, and then all he said was, "See ya, Rich," and then biked away, a fading shape in the dark.

But in his dream, Richie speaks. He says, "I don't wanna go home yet," and Eddie complains without any real fight, and Richie takes the turn away from his house and heads straight for the quarry.

The road is less familiar by car than it is by bike. It's been a long time since Richie even came out this way-- without the others around, the exploration they'd done as kids had kind of lost its luster. It's a strange, bittersweet kind of nostalgia, parking the van up the path a ways and tracing the familiar route back to the cliff's edge on foot. It's almost too dark to navigate, but this far outside of town, the stars are so incredibly bright, and the murky lake is transformed into a kind of inky black mirror. There's something beautiful, and something so terribly sad about it at the same time. He doesn't know why he ought to be so sad about it.

"Why are we out here," Eddie asks, peering at the edge, not daring too close to it when it's this dark.

"I 'unno," Richie says, and shoves his hands into his pockets. "Felt like it. Been a while." For some reason in particular, he feels like Eddie ought to be here. Richie glances around at the dusty dirt path and shrugs out of his overshirt, laying it down on the ground. "Go ahead and sit," he says. Eddie stares at him like he's grown a second head.

"Did you just lay your fucking shirt down on the ground for me to sit on like I'm some kind of 18th century lady?"

"Wh-- no, I just thought--"

"You just thought you'd be a gentleman and keep me from getting my hoop skirt dirty?"

"What, you want to go home to mommy late and have to explain a shitload of dirt stains on your ass?"

"You're the one who lured me out here with the promise of youthful rebellion, I thought you were gonna try to get me to fucking skinny dip with you or something."

Richie's brain shorts out momentarily. "Do-- do you wanna--"

"No, I don't wanna fucking skinny dip, dumbfuck, you really think I wanna keep my fucking shorts clean but I'd be just fine showing up at home all wet and smelling like stagnant swamp water?"

"I don't know, you're giving me a lot of mixed signals!"

_"Mixed signals,_ I'll show you mixed fucking--"

For one pulse-spiking moment, Richie thinks Eddie is going to shove him off the fucking cliff. Eddie lunges, and Richie jolts, and they collide, and Eddie's hands grip his undershirt tightly, shoving him back, then, inexplicably pulling him closer. Eddie's mouth collides with his violently, so that it barely registers as a kiss. Eddie essentially headbutts him. Eddie punches Richie's mouth with his mouth.

"Ow," Richie tries to say, and the sound is muffled by his mouth opening against Eddie's. Their lips slot together, and then Eddie's opening up under him, a floodgate of frantic, artless, desperate open-mouthed kisses.

"Ugh, gross," Eddie says, sucking in breaths in the brief moments when their mouths part. "You taste like egg salad."

"You taste like Listerine," Richie pants, and holds Eddie's jaw in his hands, the pads of his fingers sliding past Eddie's ears and into his hair. "How the fuck do you taste like Listerine, we-- we've been at Stan's house all afternoon."

"I asked him if I could use his bathroom," Eddie says. His teeth snag on Richie's lip, and Richie almost collapses on him.

"Oh, fuck. God. I don't think he meant 'gargle with my dad's mouthwash' but-- Oh, oh fuck."

"Gum disease doesn't stop just because you're at a party," Eddie says, and drags Richie to the ground by his shirt.

Richie tries to say something like, "Yeah, baby, keep talking about gum disease, it turns me on," but he hits the dirt hard, and then Eddie's hand goes up under his shirt to touch his stomach, and all that comes out is, "Hhhaaaughhnngk?"

Richie feels everything in double. It's the most unsettling sensation. There's part of him that's on the ground, on his knees over Eddie, laid out on top of his shirt, which is probably ruined now, kissing him for the first time. Layered over that Richie, like an offset printing error, or looking at a 3D picture without the glasses, there's another version of himself, a version that's done this a hundred times before, but not like this, never like this. Never with Eddie. This never happened.

Richie pulls back to peer down at Eddie, his glasses sliding down his nose, askew. Eddie's hair is a wreck, his lips red and wet. Richie almost forgets how to speak.

"Is this real?" Richie's breathing hard, feeling in and outside himself at the same time, disoriented.

"No," Eddie says. "Yes. I-- I don't know." His mouth is so red. Red. Red. Richie's stomach lurches.

"Oh God," he says, and hides his face in Eddie's neck, breathing in jaggedly. He can smell the dirt. He can smell Eddie's soap. Is this real? Is he?

"I'm here," Eddie says, and when Richie pulls his face back, Eddie's hands go to touch it, palms against his cheeks, holding him there. "This didn't happen, but I'm here, it's me."

Richie trembles. He feels so much older than he did just a few minutes ago. He sees Eddie almost every day, but he feels like it's been forever. Years. Decades.

"Hey, it's okay," Eddie says, and pulls Richie in, forehead to forehead. Richie's glasses knock against Eddie's nose. Eddie tilts his chin up for a kiss that barely grazes Richie's lip. Richie looks down at Eddie, really looks at him. Layer over layer, past over present. The same person, an entirely new person. The man he's loved for thirty years.

"Eddie," Richie mutters against his mouth between kisses, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. "Eddie, Eddie." He finally gives up on his glasses, yanking them off and setting them on the ground next to Eddie's head, and then he's leaning back in to kiss him more, while Eddie's hands roam under his shirt, rucking it up to his ribs. Richie's bracing himself, his weight held up on one elbow, the other hand tracing a thumb over Eddie's cheek, Richie's knee between Eddie's thighs. Eddie's hands slide down and pull Richie flush against him, and then Richie is helplessly grinding up against Eddie in his jeans. Oh God, he's so hard. Has he ever been this hard in his life?

"Richie, please," Eddie breathes into Richie's mouth, and okay, _now _Richie's the hardest he's ever been. "Please, please fucking touch me, I need you to touch me."

"Yeah, okay," Richie says, and slips his hand between their bodies to grab Eddie through his shorts. Eddie surges up, letting out a choked noise. Holy shit, Richie's head is going to explode. Eddie's hands go frantic, gripping into his shirt, sliding over his shoulders, and finally Eddie's hands card through his hair and grip the back of his head, pulling him close. Richie presses his mouth to Eddie's neck, kissing and grazing with teeth and tongue. Eddie is writhing under him. Richie honestly had no idea making out could be this good. "How's this? Is this good?"

"If you stop, I'm gonna shove you into the fucking lake," Eddie pants, gripping Richie's hair.

Richie mouths at Eddie's collarbone, leaving a wet trail behind to cool in the night air. He is honestly amazed Eddie is letting him do this-- it is objectively disgusting, but he doesn't seem to care. His breath is wildly uneven, his chest heaving like he's in the middle of one of his attacks, but he doesn't seem scared. He slides Eddie's shirt up so that it bunches under his armpits, and continues the trail down his sternum, over the faint trail of hair on his chest. Eddie shivers. Richie's hand hesitates on the button of Eddie's shorts.

"I want to-- Can I--"

Eddie sucks in a shaky breath. "I-- We're outside, what if someone sees us?"

"No one's gonna see us, Eds," Richie says. Somehow he knows it's true. This is a space they created, outside of what's real.

"Oh," Eddie sighs, like he's remembering too. This never happened, so however it happens is up to them. "Then… All right. Okay. Yes. Okay."

Richie breathes in and out, trying to calm the hammering of his heart as the button of Eddie's shorts pops open. The noise from his zipper seems so loud, even with the sound of their breathing and the shift of their clothes and the crickets chirping. Eddie is hard in his underwear. Richie's face is so hot he feels like he might pass out. He's done this before, plenty of times, but this is _Eddie_. Richie presses kisses to Eddie's stomach, which jumps and twitches under his lips. Eddie's breaths come out close to whines. Richie's fingers slide under the waistband of Eddie's underwear and tug them down, his hard cock springing free.

"Jesus motherfucking Christ," Eddie says, a rapid-fire ramble, "I swear to fuck if you don't do something right the fuck now I'm gonna fucking destroy you, please for the love of Christ, please."

"Tell me you're gonna destroy me again," Richie says, gripping the base of Eddie's dick with his thumb and forefinger. "That supervillain shit really does it for me." Then he slides his mouth down over Eddie until his lips touch his fingers.

Richie doesn't spend a lot of time talking to the guys he fucks, but if there's one thing he's reasonably confident in, it's his ability to give head. Sometimes it's just down to a lack of stamina, but he's noticed more than once the look of stunned surprise when he goes down and gets the job done in a matter of minutes. That's why it's so alarming when it doesn't seem to have the same effect on Eddie. He'd been so keyed up, he'd thrust into Richie's mouth, the head of his dick bumping up against Richie's soft palate, and Richie had swallowed around him and thought, _Yeah, I'm gonna make him come_.

But then Eddie had stilled, in increments, and his thighs were the wrong kind of tense under Richie's hands, his breathing the wrong kind of staccato. Richie's mouth slides off with a pop, and he slides his hand up, holding Eddie still.

"I can hear you thinking up there," he says. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"Get back up here," Eddie says, and Richie is quick to obey. He's kind of a blur, this close without his glasses, but he's warm and solid and breathing. Richie rests his brow against Eddie's, their noses brushing. "I don't want you that far away right now."

"Okay. Can I kiss you?"

"Wha…?" Eddie's face contorts, like he doesn't understand the question.

"It's just, my mouth's been all over your dick, so--"

Eddie swallows the rest of the sentence, surging up and pressing his mouth to Richie's. Before Richie can react, Eddie's leg is going up over his hip, yanking him down, and then flipping them over, onto their sides, and then Eddie is sliding up over him, seated on the crotch of Richie's jeans, leaning down over him to keep kissing him. Oh, this is good.

"Fuck, oh my God," Richie pants. "Holy shit. You're a sex maniac. A secret sex maniac."

"Shut the fuck up, Tozier," Eddie says, and seals it with a kiss. His hands fumble with the fly of Richie's jeans, and then they're tugging his pants, underwear and all, down over his thighs.

"Oh fuck, oh God." Richie's hands go down the back of Eddie's pants to grip his ass, pulling him flush against Richie so that his spit-slick cock slides against Richie. Eddie groans like it's been punched out of him, grinding mindlessly on top of him. "Fuck. Give it to me, Eddie. Wait, wait," he says, and slides his hands up under Eddie's shirt. Eddie lifts his arms, allowing their mouths to be parted only for the amount of time it takes to get his shirt off. Richie goes up on his elbows, yanking off his undershirt as well, and then they're back down in the dirt, rolling and fucking up against each other, skin to skin, their clothes a disheveled bunch around their thighs.

Richie's hand slips between them, and he takes them both in his long fingers together. Eddie fucks his hand recklessly, his forearms braced on either side of Richie's head, careless of the dirt and rocks. No one's going to find them. No one's going to stop them. They have no need of fear, either of ridicule or disease. They're safe. They're safe.

Richie's orgasm takes him by surprise. Eddie pushes his face into Richie's neck, kissing him, and then, after a particular stroke of his hand, bites down unexpectedly. It stings, blossoming sharp and warm, followed by the soft, wet press of Eddie's tongue laving over it, and Richie comes, grunting in shock.

Eddie follows him a minute later, thrusting against Richie through the aftershocks, through the mess of Richie's come on his stomach. It's so sloppy and undignified that Richie is amazed Eddie seems to fucking love it. He almost feels like he could get hard a second time, listening to Eddie's breaths and moans get more frantic in his ear, feeling the tense of his thighs and his ass as he finally lets go and comes as well, all over Richie's hand and stomach. Richie doesn't dare move his hand, or else he's gonna get come all over their clothes. He's not sure he could move anyway. He feels boneless and exhausted, the cold ground under him a sharp contrast to the wet warmth of Eddie's sweat-dappled skin sticking to his.

Richie's clean hand pets Eddie's head where it rests against his collarbone, sliding fingers through his hair and scratching blunt fingernails against his scalp. They're going to have to move, eventually. Richie doesn't ever want to move. He doesn't care if his arm falls asleep. He doesn't care if it falls off. If it comes to a _127 Hours_ situation, so be it.

Again, Richie only realizes he's been saying this out loud when Eddie sleepily says, "I'm gonna beat the shit out of you if you don't stop talking about amputation while my dick is in your hand."

"You're so kinky," Richie says, and carefully slides his hand out from between them, smearing the mess up his and Eddie's chests. It's somewhat disgusting, but not as bad as the mess he makes of his hand trying to wipe the come off in the dirt. "Ugh."

"Maybe we should swim after all," Eddie says, his mouth moving against Richie's throat. Yeah, Richie definitely can't get hard again, but his body is making a noble effort. "Murky water is probably better than… this."

"Okay," Richie says. "Gotta get your shorts the rest of the way off, first."

"In a minute," Eddie says. Richie just keeps running his fingers through Eddie's hair, down over his shoulderblades and tracing the ridge of his spine, feeling the goosebumps raised by the air cooling Eddie's sweat. He almost thinks Eddie's fallen asleep when he shifts, reluctantly separating their bodies. "Oh, holy fuck, that's so fucking gross. Oh my God."

"You really know how to sweet talk a guy, Eddie dearest," Richie says, propping himself up by his elbows. His dick is soft and hanging over the band of his underwear ridiculously, a puddle of tacky semen cooling on his stomach and making a mess of the hair that runs down his chest and belly.

"You are getting in that water," Eddie says. "Here." He tugs off Richie's shoes and socks, then grabs the band of his jeans and yanks them down over his legs, tossing them into a pile with the rest of their clothes. Dirt sticks to Richie's skin wherever it touches the ground. Eddie unlaces his shoes as well, setting them in a neat pile with his shorts and underwear on top.

When Richie tries to stand, his knees wobble terribly. His joints pop, his muscles groaning. Evidently his body had caught up with his mind, and fucking on the hard ground had been rough on it. He offers Eddie a hand, and when he tries to pull Eddie up, he almost topples over himself. He doesn't let go of Eddie's hand.

The world through Richie's eyes is a haze of purple and blue, but Eddie's hand is warm and solid in his, and the breeze is cool on his hot skin, and the air is clean and fresh, and he's in love.

Before he can think about it, he's running full-tilt towards the cliff. He hits the edge, takes a leap, and he's soaring--

_"Woooo!"_ he yells, his shout echoing in the man-made canyon, until he hits the water and all the breath is shocked from his lungs. It's fucking _freezing._

His head crests the surface just in time to feel the wave of Eddie's cannonball, and he sputters as the water rushes into his mouth and up his nose. His teeth chatter.

"Holy fucking God, fucking fuck, fuck, _shit!!_ Cold! _Fuck!!"_ Eddie huddles up close to Richie, palms flat against his back. "Why the fuck is it so cold?!"

"It's the middle of the night," Richie says, his voice a jumble of chattering. He kicks his legs, hoping the movement will warm him up.

"We're gonna get f-fucking hypothermia."

"Okay, just wash off real quick and--" Richie can't finish, because his head is shoved under the water, air bubbling out of his lungs. He's released immediately, and he resurfaces coughing. "What the fuck, you dick!"

"That's for convincing me we oughta skinny dip, fucker," Eddie says, and splashes Richie in the face.

"You're the one who decided we should wash off, would you rather I smeared jizzy mud all over your clothes instead?" Richie retaliates, lunging for Eddie, who swims away, yelping. "Get back here, you little shit."

"Fuck you!"

They splash around wildly, thrashing and flailing in the water. Richie dunks Eddie in face-first, and Eddie throws his arms around Richie's waist, dragging him under and pushing him down by the shoulders. Richie laughs and screams, gulping down air, coughing up water. When he breaks the surface, the world is a blur of sky and the pale shape of Eddie in the moonlight. When he goes under, the world goes dark and dull, the sound of water roaring and the pulsing of his own blood in his ears. Three times he goes under, and the world spins. Eddie's warm laughter, the slap of skin hitting water. Blackness, cold, sinking. Up. Under. Up. Under.

Up.

\--

When Richie wakes, he knows he is alone.

He lies still on the floor for a while, staring at the place behind him in the mirror, where Eddie is not. The living room is still. It's almost light out, the sun still hiding behind the trees and painting the landscape in washed out grays and pinks. It's so quiet. Richie can feel every pump of his heart, every cell of blood in his veins. If he moves, the sound might shatter him.

His glasses have left red indentations on his face where they pressed into it while he slept. Stiffly, deliberately, he brings his arm up to adjust them, and sits up. He folds the blanket up into a rectangle and sets it and the pillow on the couch, and then he walks to the back door and steps outside into the cold morning.

It's actually freezing outside. Richie slept in his jeans, but he left his jacket inside. He doesn't go back for it. The cold gives him something to focus on. He walks, trance-like, out towards to treeline, and into the inviting darkness. He sits at the base of a tree whose bright red leaves have begun to form a skirt around its base. The ground is all over in dew, and the damp seeps into his pants where he sits. He shivers, pulling his knees up to his chest.

When he was young, he often heard cries out his bedroom window. When he was little, he'd thought it was the sound of a baby crying. He used to wonder how the neighbors could be so neglectful, or such heavy sleepers, that they could let their child cry through the night like that. A while later he realized the sound a fox makes sounds so much like a baby's cry, it was easy to mistake their speech for a human's. It was hard to tell, in Derry, between the things you heard in the dark.

When Richie cries, he wails, and he thinks of the foxes in the woods, and what they might have been calling for.

The sun is starting to break through the trees, hot fingers of light over his frozen arms, when Bev approaches him, the leaves barely making a sound under her bare feet. The dog trails after her, sniffing around at fallen leaves and darting around the yard excitedly. Bev has a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and she drapes one end over him, sidling up next to him with her arm pressed against his. She doesn't say anything. Richie knows what she would say, anyway.

She pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her sweater pocket, lights one, and inhales. The smoke wafts comfortably around them, warm and dry in the cold damp. After a minute, she offers him a drag. He accepts, his arms moving as stiffly as rusted out machinery. He doesn't smoke cigarettes regularly, but right now it's as comforting as a hug. His lungs can breathe. His heart can beat. These thoughts he can bear.

He wipes his face off with the heel of his hand, turning his head into his shoulder to rub his nose. He must be shiny and red and disgusting-looking by now. Bev doesn't give him shit for it. He understands a little, he thinks, why most of the Losers were at least a little bit in love with her.

"Wanna go back in?" She puts out the cigarette in the dirt by their feet. "Ben's making coffee."

"Yeah, okay," Richie says. He feels hollowed out, a yawning empty space behind his sternum where all his grief used to be. Where did it go? Did he cry it all out?

Ben makes a good cup of coffee. Richie almost wishes the coffee was shittier so he'd have something to blame someone else for, which is a very uncharitable thought he immediately feels guilty about. He loves Ben. Ben's his friend. He has vanishingly few of those left now, and he has to be better about looking after them. The warm coffee feels like it's dripping into the emptiness slowly, filling it up, sloshing around and waking up the dead nerves.

Bill and Mike trod in, sleepy-eyed and bed-headed.

"Good morning," Mike says. "Everyone sleep okay?"

Tears spill over Richie's cheeks and down over his chin, dripping onto his chest. He catches himself, turning his head away. "Shit," he mutters.

"Richie," says Bill, a look of confusion passing over his face, before he glances past him, and then around the room. "Oh… Jesus, are…?"

"They're gone," Bev says. "Some time last night."

Bill covers his mouth, smearing his hand over his face. Mike's shoulders sink, but he doesn't look all that shocked. Eddie and Stan hadn't ever really physically been there, but some undeniable, intangible energy is gone from the room now that they're nowhere to be seen. 

"One last party," Mike says. He rubs Bill's shoulder briefly, then pulls Bev in for a hug.

"I hope they got what they needed," she says against Mike's chest. "I really do."

\---

They stay awhile, quiet and subdued. None of them have any immediate obligations, and none of them want to be alone. Mike offers to cook, and does eggs to everyone's specifications, even rising to the challenge when Bev tells him to make an omelet with whatever is in Ben's fridge. Ben offers to take them on a walk around the woods, once they're dressed, and the five of them plus Athena all trundle out into the fall air together, winding aimlessly around on the deserted road that passes by Ben's property. The cold feels so much like their hometown, like growing up. Richie isn't ready to go back to warmth yet. There's so much growing up he still hasn't done.

Mike and Ben decide to leave the following morning, but Richie makes his excuses and bows out that day.

"I've gotta return this fucking car," he says. "But I'll call you guys soon."

"As soon as you're home, okay?" Ben says, and hugs him. His phone chimes in his pocket, and he pulls it out to see a text from Bev, sent to all four of them: a little poop emoji. Richie snorts.

"Expect more of those if you forget, Richie Tozier," Bev says. "I will give you shit every day for the rest of your life."

"Stone cold, Beverly Marsh," he says, hands in the air in surrender. "Un-fuck-with-able."

Bev kisses him on the corner of his mouth. Bill shakes his hand, and tugs him in for a solid bro-hug, slapping him on the back twice before releasing him. Mike, the only one present who's bigger than he is, envelops him with an open-armed hug with no pretenses, just warmth and a solid grip. He loves these people, his family. He doesn't want to leave, but he also can't quite handle being there with them right now. There's too much rattling around in his cavernous body.

He plugs an address into the GPS. The given ETA is around four hours from now. He steps on the gas, and he drives.

\---

As surely as they had noticed Eddie and Stan's final passing, something has undeniably left Derry since he was last here. The town feels quieter, more still. Fewer people walk its streets, and even more of the local businesses have been locked and boarded up, "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" and "FINAL SALE" and "LAST CHANCE" signs littering the storefront windows.

As he approaches Neibolt Street, more and more houses sit empty, "For Sale" signs amended by "Price Lowered" signs, and eventually giving way to foreclosures as he draws closer to the end of the street, where tall chain-link fences have blocked entry to a construction site. There's an excavator, and a pile of scrapped wood and concrete, and next to that, the sinkhole that is Edward Kasprak's final resting place.

Richie looks around at the deserted neighborhood. Countless traumas had been enacted upon them in this place, and no one had ever spared a glance out their windows to see. Now there was no one left to see, even if they cared to look. He grabs the fence, jamming his foot into the base and clambering up, straining with the effort, the wire mesh straining under his weight. He was never all that great at the rope climb in P.E., and he never went to climb that indoor rock-wall with his LA friends when they'd tried to get him to do something that counted as exercise, but he manages, gritting his teeth and trying not to let the sweat of his palms loosen his grip.

Crossing over the top of the fence is almost harder, as he tries to get a foothold without tearing his palms open on the rough edges of the sheared metal wire. He almost slips on the way down, and when he tries to jump the last couple of feet, he lands badly and rolls his ankle, tumbling to the ground and almost to the edge of the chasm. Rocks spill over the edge, echoing, down, down. Eddie is down there. Eddie is down there right now.

Richie stays down in the dirt, lets his hand dangle over the edge. More dust and rocks tumble down into the pit.

"Eddie," Richie says. The sound seems too quiet, too dead. "Eddie," he says louder, and it bounces back a little bit. "Are you there?" He climbs to his knees, crossing them under himself, then positioning himself at the very edge. The ground might give way at any moment. At any time, the sinkhole could widen, and open a crack from here to the coast, and swallow all of Derry up into the ground, all of the empty houses and empty buildings and Richie's empty body tumbling into the earth. "I'm sorry I wasn't better," he says. "I'm sorry I didn't love you right. The way I should've. If I could do it all again, I'd do it right this time. Whatever I had to do, I would've done it. We should have had more time to get it right. We should've…"

Richie sees tears falling into the pit. He realizes he's leaning over the edge the same moment he realizes that Eddie isn't here. His body will melt into the earth and become something else, but Eddie is gone. Eddie was with him, until he wasn't, but he stopped being here, in this place, months ago. And he's thankful for that. God, is he thankful that Eddie isn't trapped in this horrible, rotted-out skeleton of a place forever.

"Agh, fuck," Richie chokes. _"Fuck!"_ He shouts into the hole, pushing himself to his feet and screaming until his throat is raw with it, his voice cracking, until his lungs fill with air again instead of nothing, nothing, nothing.

He sits at the edge of the pit, breathing, allowing himself to feel it until he can bear the thought of living with this. When he feels like he can move again, he begins the process of climbing back over the fence. The dirt from the destroyed ground aids his movement, providing traction that keeps his hands from slipping. When he lands on the other side, he wipes his hands on his jeans.

He's hungry.

He stops at a gas station and fills up the rental, and takes a pre-made egg salad sandwich with him. He drives to the synagogue and parks in front, eating his sandwich, mayonnaise and egg yolk clinging to his fingers. He thinks about God, and if there's any such thing, and where Eddie and Stan might be, if they're anywhere at all. He doesn't know if they can hear him, and he's not sure it matters, because they're done, and all that they ever would be had finished.

"I know what my dad thinks," Stan had told him once, lying in the dark at the sleepaway camp they'd both been signed up for one summer. A year later, he would become a man. "But I think it's sort of more complicated than that. I don't know. He has all these books in his office, and there's stuff I'm supposed to memorize, but the other stuff is way more interesting, you know? There are all these questions. And it's like, they _want_ you to ask. And I think maybe God wants you to ask. There's not just one answer for everything. It's like all these people saying God is the answer, but I think maybe God is the question. Does that make sense?"

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Richie had said, and offered him half of a melted Snickers bar he'd smuggled in the band of his shorts.

Richie smiles. For some reason, he wants to eat twenty more of these bland little egg sandwiches. He plugs a new address into his GPS and hits call on a contact he hasn't glanced at in way too long. Someone on the other end picks up.

"Hey, mom," he says. "Sorry I haven't called in a while… Yeah. Yeah, it's… Look, I'm actually in your neck of the woods for once. Like an hour or so away. You mind if I come by, maybe we can catch up?" He clears his throat, taking a deep breath. "Yeah. Yeah, I've got some stuff I'd like to talk to you and dad about. I've… I've missed you guys. Yeah. Yeah, of course, I can pick up green beans on my way in. Sure. Yeah, mom, I love you too. See you soon."

When the call ends, he sucks in a shaky breath, holding and releasing. He turns the key in the ignition, and the engine roars to life, gas and oil and machinery chugging underneath him. He's got a full tank of gas, an hour of sunlight left, and his whole life ahead of him.

**Author's Note:**

>   
  



End file.
